


This Heart, Pulled Apart

by orphan



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bucky Barnes's Trigger Words, Identity Porn, M/M, Multiple Orgasms, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Slightly more than canon-typical violence, Super Soldier Sex, about a two or three on the bucky barnes bad day o meter, definitely more than canon-typical cursing, internalized dehumanizatiion, man with a plan, witholding information from the audience for fun and drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-08-19 21:49:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 37,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20216812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan/pseuds/orphan
Summary: Steve Rogers catches up with him eleven months, twelve days, and five thousand miles from the banks of the Potomac. Doesn’t even have the decency to be subtle about it; just walks into the goddamn safehouse like he owns it.Basically a love-letter to 2014-era Stucky fandom, based on the premise: "What if Steve had found The Book prior to the events ofCivil War."





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *rocks up to a canon non-compliant id-tastic plotbunny five years late holding a Shiraz* "... Yo."
> 
> _Right hand to God_  
_First in command_  
_My testimony, when I take the stand_  
_[Who's the man](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3xcybdis1k)?_

Sam Wilson is holed up in a mezzanine broom closet and down to his last three grenades when he admits to himself that, this time, he might well and truly be dead.

There’s a decayed grey mop draped over his head like a piss-stinking wig and not even the sound of his heart drowns out the voices of the men down below. Seven of them, the last remnants of the STRIKE team he’d stumbled into, like a complete fucking amateur, exactly four months and two days since he last said good night to the hollow-eyed shell of the man they’d once called Captain America.

Eleven months, almost to the day, since Steve had woken up from his post-Potomac coma, nothing in his head but an obsessive, burning need to chase the ghost who’d put him there.

Sam had gone with him. He doesn’t like to think too hard about why. Or whether their mission had been a hunt or been a rescue or been something else entirely. And then that morning when he’d woken up to find Steve gone, and had sat across the table from Natasha and then knew, just _knew_, that neither of them were getting out any way than getting through, and—

And now this. A broom closet in a not-so abandoned, not-so-ex HYDRA base, smack bang in the middle of Bumfuckți, Romania, and all Sam can think is, _Well, Cap. I fucking tried._

Somewhere down below, a half-dozen Nazi-wannabe shitheels are arguing the best way to get up the stars without Sam rolling down another grenade to meet them. He’s short on supplies, sure, but they’re getting short on people and Sam isn’t the one who’s gonna run out first. Not unless they come up with something tricky.

Something like:

“Control says they’re sending backup.”

“Contr—?” is as far as Nazi Asshole #2 gets, before the huge metallic booming of a kicked-in door echos off sterile bunker walls, followed by the heavy thud of boots.

“Holy shit,” Sam hears, in various incarnations. “I thought it—”

And then:

“Report.”

A new voice. Sam doesn’t know it, or doesn’t think he does, but there’s something about it—some flat, almost metallic edge—that sends something cold and atavistic curling in his gut.

“Uh,” says Miscellaneous Fucking Nazi. “O-one hostile, holed up in the cupboard on the mezzanine. Armed. Uh, p-pistol. Plus grenades. Unknown number. Um. S-sir?” Asked like a question.

“Acknowledged,” says Robot Voice. “Remain here. Provide cover. Do not engage.”

“Uh . . .” says Different Fucking Nazi. “Sure. Wait, are you—”

Then a soft sound, like the rustle of cloth maybe, and—

Sam should’ve seen it coming. Except those footfalls had been so loud, so he’d been straining to catch more. Fucking amateur fucking hour. He decides to let himself be mad about it, as his body is being hauled sideways, unexpected, pulled suddenly from the closet like it’s nothing. His fingers scramble on the grenade he’s holding but by the time they’ve figured out what’s what Sam is empty-handed, face smashed into the cold concrete floor with a knee in his lower back and fingers stripping him of his pistol and knife and keys and phone and his fucking _wallet_. It all takes three seconds, tops. Then Sam’s being hauled upright once again, hands zip-tied behind his back as he’s turned to come eye-to-featureless fucking goggle lens of none other than the Winter fucking Soldier.

_Found your boy, Steve,_ Sam thinks. _Asshole._

* * *

* * *

Steve Rogers catches up with him eleven months, twelve days, and five thousand miles from the banks of the Potomac. Doesn’t even have the decency to be subtle about it; just walks into the goddamn safehouse like he owns it.

Barnes—the thing that’s started thinking of itself as “Barnes”, if only as a shortcut past every other possibility—just lets it happen. He doesn’t want to fight, and the fact he’s halfway through digging the bullets out of his leg make running a shitty alternative. The bullets aren’t Steve’s doing—they’re a last-ditch fuck-you from a HYDRA head currently severed and floating down the Bega—but Barnes would bet the timing isn’t a coincidence. _Man with a plan!_ the old propaganda had claimed, too-bright yet too-faded on the walls in that fucking museum. Devious little shit, more like. Barnes might not remember much but he remembers that.

“Do you know who I am?” Steve asks, because fuck him.

Barnes just stares, sitting in a pool of his own blood with a filthy needle and thread hanging from his teeth. He says nothing, because that’s what he knows. Say nothing, look at nothing. People will tell you what they want from you eventually. And they all want something.

Steve shifts, just a fraction. Looking around the safehouse, maybe. Maybe safehouse is generous. Maybe squat is better. Or foxhole.

“How much of me do you remember?” Steve amends, voice needle-sharp in the fading light. No electricity, just the day’s tattered remains, filtered through the crumbling walls.

Barnes shrugs, goes back to stitching up his leg. “Enough.” His voice is like a rusted vault door, the sound surprising even him.

Steve exhales. “Good,” he says. “That . . . that’s good.”

There’s a shitty little table and a half-broken chair just inside the door, and Steve sits down. The table is covered with weapons and more blood, dried and reeking, but neither of them mention it. There’s nothing Steve could do with gun or knife that Barnes would fear.

He finishes mainten— finishes _stitching_ up his leg, washing off the last of the blood with an upended bottle of vodka he stole from a store three towns away. Probably not better than leaving it dirty, but maybe that’s the point. The Soldier is dead but the Asset lingers, a broken-down machine Barnes has pointed straight at the earth, a frantic crash-course suicide run designed to take out as many of his former masters as he can before the engines finally fail.

Steve says nothing. Just sits, and watches. Sketching Barnes in his mind, maybe. Trying to memorize light and shadow well enough to regurgitate it later in a violent crash of paint or charcoal. Maybe. Does Steve even do that any more? Or is it yet another thing the war—the ice, the crash, the serum—took from him?

And then, before Barnes can stop himself:

“Do you still. Do you. Paint.” Speaking is still like trying to fire a half-rusted Browning. Dangerous and uneven.

Steve startles, blinking. Barnes’s eyes still won’t settle on a human outside of combat, but he can run them around the edges enough to fill in the details.

Steve has a beard, almost as thick as Barnes’s own. Strange. Good, maybe, but . . . strange.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Yeah, Buck, I— Well. Not . . . not recently, I guess. Since I— Since the ice. Never enough time for it, somehow.” Not just an answer; a whole explanation! Like he thinks he’s talking to a certified real boy, or one specific one, and not just a rotting ghost and a hunk of rusted metal.

“You should. Make time.” Assets don’t ask questions and they definitely don’t give orders. Hence Barnes has been practicing both.

Steve smiles beneath the beard; small and sad, but still a smile. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. I— I will.”

Barnes nods, and goes to the far side of the room. Packing up; needles and bottles and guns. Dismissive, like their business is done. Like the only reason Steve staged this ambush was to get career advice from the corpse of his childhood friend.

Yeah. Right.

“Bucky, I—”

“Why. Are you here.” He still hasn’t gotten the hang of questions. The sentence comes out but the punctuation doesn’t follow. Russian is easier. Polish. French. They have words for it. But English is the language of the Barnes-thing, so he struggles through what he’s got.

“I—” Steve starts, leaning forward, eyes Tesseract-blue in the gloom. And just as dangerous.

“Now. You could’ve— Before. But. Why now? Alone.”

Months he’s been chasing ghosts and monsters across Europe, menagerie in tow. Not close enough. Never quite close enough.

Steve leans back, closes those monstrously beautiful eyes. He doesn’t open them again when he speaks. Barnes can’t remember the last time someone was voluntarily blind in his presence.

“You pulled me out of the river,” Steve says. “You saved my life. Afterwards . . . Natasha had intel. I mean, you weren’t subtle. With HYDRA. I told them I wanted to find you, but . . . but truthfully? I thought maybe if I . . . I was just _there_, helping, that maybe you’d . . . come home.”

Not unreasonable. Barnes has thought about it, visions of too-large museum pieces clashing against the fried, ragged stumps of memory. He isn’t stupid. He knows Steve would take back the empty shell of James Buchanan Barnes. In a heartbeat. No questions. Would wrap that relic up in warm beds and hot meals and fight the whole goddamn world to keep it. Barnes knows this. Doesn’t mean that it’s an option.

“Six weeks ago,” Steve continues. “Things . . . changed. We got lucky. Nat— It doesn’t matter. Just dumb fucking luck; turned left when we’d been planning on right. And we . . . we found a man. He’s dead now. But he had . . . he had this.”

And Steve reaches into his jacket, pulls out a red notebook and puts it on the table.

Barnes doesn’t scream. Barnes doesn’t scream because the Solder can’t move. Every muscle locked tight, eyes zeroed in on a single, void-black star.

“You know what this is.” Not a question. From somewhere deep—somewhere far, beneath the ice, behind the glass—Barnes supposes his breathing gives it away. The one little bug they never quite managed to burn away.

“No one else has read it,” Steve says. There’s a rubber band around the book, as if in proof of his words. “Only me. And when I did, I . . . I knew. Why you wouldn’t—” Choked off, too much there. Pain. Rage. Steve drops his head, fingers squeezing the bridge of his nose. “Buck,” he says eventually. When the words come back. “You said you . . . you said you remembered me?”

He looks up, impossible eyes aching for an answer. He gets one, barely: the asset’s neck is a rusted hinge but Barnes swings it, just once.

“I have . . . a plan,” Steve says. “But it’s . . . You’d have to trust me. And I know you— I know it’s a lot. To ask. After everything. But . . .” He trails off.

_Man with a plan,_ the posters said. _Devious little shit, _the memories echoed back. Someone Bucky had trusted, more than all the angels and all the saints and God himself all put together.

The Soldier didn’t trust. The Soldier couldn’t; had learnt that lesson maybe first of all.

And Barnes? Barnes knows the truth of it; that’s it never really been about something as fleeting as _trust_ at all.

* * *

* * *

The Soldier doesn’t shoot him. Sam isn’t sure whether he’s pleased with this or not, not when he’s forced to his knees in front of the remains of the STRIKE team, the Solder’s voice growling, “Collateral,” up above.

“For what?” asks Miscellaneous Fucking Nazi. He’s older, seemingly in charge, with salt pepper hair and a scar bisecting his chin. White, because of course he is.

The Soldier does not answer Agent Scar, instead stands rigid a few paces back from the group, MP5 on hand but pointed down. Guarding or powered down or waiting for orders or . . . something. It gives Sam the creeps. It gives the HYDRA goons the creeps, too, which Sam decides is even worse. They keep muttering half-cut-off things like “thought it was a myth” and “heard it’d gone rogue” and “thought they’d put it down for good.” Sam wonders if it killed Natasha. God, he hopes not. Her com’s been dead since this mess started, and the shit of it is Sam can’t even ask because he’s got no idea if HYDRA even knows she was here.

He needs to think of a way out of this. _Collateral_, the Soldier had called him. Sam can really only think of one person he could be collateral _for_.

“You don’t have to do this, man.” Sam’s bound and guarded, meaning the STRIKE assholes aren’t paying attention to him. Are busy stripping the base and their dead and other HYDRA bullshit. Talking to the Soldier is a long-ass shot but, well. If there’s one guy who knows about long-ass shots, it’s Sergeant James Barnes.

“We can help you.” Sam’s voice is barely above a whisper, but he knows Steve can hear a goddamn pin drop at a Mets game, and he’s betting on the Soldier being the same. He’s seen the files. “Steve knows you saved him”—not the word Sam would use, but also not the time to nitpick—“Even if you don’t remember him he’d move Heaven and Earth for you, man. You just need to—”

“Hey! Hey what’re you— You shut the fuck up!”

The next part is . . . sort of hazy. There’s pain, exploding out from the side of Sam’s head. His world lurches sideways as he crumples, awkward without hands, even as the gunshot rings out and a body hits the ground heavy not two feet away. When Sam’s eyes will next focus, all he can see is the half-blown-off face of the asshole who’d pistolwhipped him, lying in a pool of blood and brains.

Everyone else freezes. Hands halfway to their weapons, not daring to draw.

And the Soldier, the fucking Soldier, still standing ramrod straight like it didn’t just blow out some sumbitch’s brains in the space between two heartbeats.

“The collateral is not damaged,” it grates out in that awful voice.

No one dares to argue.

* * *

* * *

_Longing. Rusted. Furnace. Daybreak. Seventeen. Benign. Nine. Homecoming. One. Freight car._

* * *

The asset opens its eyes, and the Soldier stares out.

It is sitting in a room, on a chair, at a table. Across the table, on an identical chair, is Steven Grant Rogers (rank: Captain, codename: Captain America, alias: Cap, alias: Steve, alias: Stevie). They are in a farmhouse, around sixty miles from Bucharest. One of Steven Rogers’s safehouses, information the Soldier knows because the asset has not been recently wiped.

Because the asset has not been wiped, the last thing the Soldier remembers, before malfunction, was failing the kill order on Steven Rogers. Mission failure is unacceptable. Mission failure brings punishment, but . . .

But Steven Rogers has the Book. Steven Rogers said the Trigger. Steven Rogers—

“Override code emil-ludwig-ludwig-fünf-drei-eins-eins-viktor,” Steven Rogers says.

The Solder’s hands unclench. A transfer code. It failed a mission to kill Steven Rogers and has been transferred to the command of Steven Rogers. Perhaps punishment will be brief, then.

“Ready to comply,” says the Soldier.

Steven Rogers, the Captain, exhales. He, too, unclenches his fists where they sit atop the table. The sweat has left little rings of condensation on the lacquered wood.

“Do you know me?” the Captain asks, and the Soldier does, and so nods. When nothing else is forthcoming, the Captain scowls.

Scowling is bad. Most expressions on handlers are bad, but scowling especially so, second only to smiles. The asset’s heart picks up even as the Soldier tries to keep its breathing steady. The response is automatic, despite the circumstances. The Soldier does not think the Captain will harm the asset. The asset is the source of the malfunction, and the malfunction belongs to the Captain. But the Captain may harm the Soldier, and the Soldier knows very well every way a mind can be broken while keeping the body intact.

The Captain told the malfunction he had a plan. He did not explain what it was.

“What is my name?” the Captain amends.

“Captain Steven Grant Rogers,” the Soldier answers.

“Good.” The Captain smiles, and the Soldier . . .

Smiles can be the only expression worse than scowls, but the asset has not been wiped and so the Soldier knows the Captain’s smiles are most often good. The Captain does not smile at things that displease him, which means he must be pleased with the Soldier’s answer. This good. Pleasing handlers is . . . good.

And then:

“What is _your_ name?” the Captain asks.

This question makes no sense; humans have names. Pets. Ships. The Soldier is a weapon. Weapons do not have names. Weapons have models.

“What do they call you?” comes the amendment, into the Soldier’s obvious confusion.

“Soldier.”

The Captain exhales, fingers flexing against the table. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. Thank you, Soldier.”

The Soldier has been thanked before, of course. Sometimes sincerely, sometimes not. Memories stored by the asset indicate the Captain does not give insincere thanks, at least not in that voice, and so the Soldier allows a brief flush of pleasure at the word. Pleasing handlers is good. Pleasing the Captain is . . . better.

“You accepted the transfer code,” the Captain continues. It isn’t really a question but the Soldier nods regardless. “Good,” is the reply. “That’s . . . that’s good. I’m sure you’re aware . . . You’ve been with HYDRA for a very long time, now. Too long. That never should have happened and I’d like to extend a personal apology. I— Nothing can ever make up for— for what you’ve been through, but—” The Captain falters, voice choking with emotion. The Soldier knows why, because the asset has not been wiped and stores knowledge of the fall in the alps. Memories, maybe, though it’s hard to tell what is true and what is invented on the back of reading little plaques in a long-distant museum. Regardless, the Captain blames himself for the loss of his childhood friend, James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes, the shell that would be hollowed out to form the asset, to house the Soldier.

The Soldier knows this, but can do nothing with it, and so sits still and silent while the Captain buries his face against his hand, shoulders shaking.

It takes some time, but the Soldier is patent, and eventually the Captain subsides. He pulls himself upright, sniffing, fists clenching on the table.

“I— I’m sorry,” he says. “I— Jesus. I thought I—”

Displeasing handlers is . . . not good. The Captain may not be displeased with the Soldier directly but, regardless, displeased handlers are not good. So the Soldier says:

“Ready to comply.”

Handlers, in the Soldier’s experience, are pleased with expressions of obedience and compliance. With returns to normality when there are . . . malfunctions. Usually the Soldier’s, but not always, and the process is remains the same regardless.

The Soldier’s voice is soft, almost gentle, and the Captain blinks at the sound. He opens his mouth as if to speak, then closes it. Then, finally:

“Thank you, B— Soldier,” he says. “I— okay. Okay.” Another exhale, long and slow, accompanied by the flex of long, elegant fingers against the table.

“You understand you’ve been transferred?” The Soldier does, and so nods, and the Captain continues: “Good. Things are . . . I know you’re used to things being done a certain way, but that’s going to change. Your former— _controllers_, they . . . the way they did things, there are better ways. You’re here to get used to those, okay? That’s my job. Get you, uh, acclimated. To how we’re going to do things. From . . . from now on.”

This explanation is causing the Captain distress. Because of what was done to Sergeant Barnes. The Soldier is very, very good at determining human motivations and emotional states—a skill useful both on missions and off—and the Captain’s distress is . . . problematic. The Soldier knows its existence is at the expense of the Sergeant’s and that, if forced to choose, the Captain would prefer the return of the latter. The Soldier understands the concept of deprogramming—the malfunction had read about it, and the asset has not been wiped and so retains this memory—and assumes that this is what the Captain is attempting. If the process goes . . . poorly, then the Soldier is unsure how the Captain will react. Perhaps the asset will be returned to storage, or destroyed. The Soldier does not have wants but the asset has not been wiped and is malfunctioning, and the malfunction thinks those options are desirable, even as it knows the Captain possesses the nerve to do neither.

The Soldier is competent at performing the Sergeant; it has done so before, when required by missions, even if the asset does not retain the specific memories. But the Soldier does not believe that will be an option in this scenario. It doubts the Captain could be fooled, for one, and for second the malfunction _screams_ at the very thought. The malfunction has been manageable since the Soldier awoke. Exacerbating it further would seem a . . . poor operational choice.

“I’ve developed a, uh. A routine,” the Captain is saying. “To get you used to how things will be. We can start right now, unless you have any questions?”

The Soldier really only ever has one question (_what is my mission?_) and it’s seemingly just been answered. Indicating this to the Captain leads to him standing up.

“All right. If you think of anything, just ask okay? I know . . . it might not have been . . . encouraged. Before. For you to do that. But it’s one of the things we’re doing differently now. You’re allowed to ask questions.”

Being allowed to do something does not change the fact the Soldier has no requirement to do it, and so simply follows the Captain in silence when directed. They walk through the house—the Captain’s safehouse is exactly that, a domestic house—and into a large garage area that has been converted into a spartan gym. This is not unexpected. Both the Soldier and the Captain are wearing modern athletic clothing, far more comfortable than the Soldier’s tactical gear and cleaner than the stolen rags of the malfunction, and because the asset is . . . glitching, the Soldier knows new handlers often enjoy physical demonstrations of the Soldier’s capabilities.

“Today,” the Captain says, “we’re going to do . . . Well. In our day we called this calisthenics but they tell me the ‘cool’ term is ‘CrossFit’ now.” He smirks as he says it, wriggling his fingers in the air to indicate irony. “I’m told it’s supposed to be hard. Sam— You remember Sam? You pulled off his wing and kicked him off a helicarrier. He’s fine, incidentally. But Sam, he hates watching me do this.” A pause. “And I think Natasha enjoys it _too_ much, you know? Honestly, I don’t know which is worse. I guess I’m still not used to—” A gesture at himself.

The Soldier is not used to being spoken to like a person, especially not by a handler. The asset is spoken about and the Soldier is given orders to, but rarely has a requirement for small talk, and perhaps what the Captain is really doing is trying to speak to the corpse of his dead friend. People speak frequently to the dead, the Soldier knows, because the Soldier is well-versed in death and grief. So, it seems, is the Captain, albeit perhaps in a different way.

The rest of the morning is . . . strangely relaxing. They do sets of exercises, some the Soldier is familiar with (pull-ups, push-ups) and some not (Turkish get-ups, burpees). The Captain teaches the Soldier how to perform the unfamiliar activities, watching carefully to ensure correct form. Then they execute repetitions together, the Captain issuing commands on when to switch and when to break.

The breaks are . . . unexpected. The asset’s memories of similar past activities are glitched enough to recall, and feature a non-zero number of sessions ending in unconsciousness or torn or broken limbs. But the Captain does not appear interested in testing the upper bounds of the asset’s capabilities, so perhaps instead this is a test of the Solder’s efficacy at following orders?

If so, the Captain appears pleased. During breaks, he says things like, “Good work, Soldier!” and issues water as a reward, with instructions for the Soldier to drink as much or as little as the asset requires.

“Sam always tells me hydration is important,” the Captain says during one such break. He’s sitting on the floor next to a kettlebell, so the Soldier is as well. “Honestly, I think he’s a bit obsessed with it. So is everyone nowadays. It wasn’t like this when we were kids, I’m sure.”

The Soldier drinks another mouthful. The water is cool and optimal. Refreshingly unadulterated. “The asset is functional for up to a hundred and twenty hours without hydration,” the Soldier supplies, because it seems relevant.

Nonetheless, the information does not appear to make the Captain happy. “Geeze, Buck,” he says, quietly, and not to the Soldier. His expression folds into one of pure agony for the moment it takes him to compose himself. Then, when he does: “Uh. Well, hopefully it won’t come to that.”

As it turns out, it does not. At 1300 they break for lunch and what the Captain, with more wriggling fingers, calls a “bio break”.

(“Um. I know . . . Maybe it’s not what you’re used to, but here, you’re always allowed to, uh. Take care of yourself. Food, water, bathroom. Stuff like that. You don’t need permission.” The Soldier does not feel awkward, yet . . . Awkward. For everyone.)

Lunch is sandwiches. The Captain lays out soft bread and rich red tomatoes and crisp green lettuce. Golden cheese and smoky ham and hot mustard. The Soldier assists in preparing the ingredients then, at the Captain’s direction, assembles lunch.

The mustard is a test. The Captain slathers it gleefully across his bread then places the jar near the Soldier, as if expecting the same. But the asset is glitched and so the Soldier knows mustard does not agree with it. Meaning which directive will the Soldier follow? The more immediate suggestion for mustard or the long-term mission to care for the asset?

The Soldier does not put mustard on its sandwiches. They are efficiently optimal. The Soldier eats five.

* * *

The afternoon is more “cross fit”, during which the Soldier discovers the ability to do one-finger pushups with the Captain sitting on the asset’s back, but only if the Soldier uses the weapon (with the asset’s flesh hand, the Soldier requires all fingers). The Captain finds this discovery joyful, in the way some handlers do when the asset demonstrates particular quirks, though does not make the Soldier repeat the activity to the point of breaking, which demonstrates more wisdom and restraint than many previous handlers.

By 1700 they are both slick with sweat and the asset’s muscles burn with a strangely satisfying ache.

“Just two more things on the agenda,” the Captain says, handing the Soldier a pile of clothes and a towel. “First, get cleaned up and changed.” The Captain makes another one of those expressions, similar to the one he made during the “bio break” talk, and the Soldier knows he’s wondering whether the Soldier is capable of following this direction and, importantly, what he’ll do if the answer is no.

The Soldier is capable of following this direction, and so says, “Acknowledged,” before retreating into the bathroom. The Captain definitely does not look disappointed by this, because that would be . . . unnecessary. Dangerous. Imagining that scenario triggers the malfunction, and so the Soldier does not. Instead strips and washes the asset in the bathroom’s overly luxurious shower.

The Soldier makes the water very hot, because it is pleasing to the asset, which the Soldier must now take care of. The Soldier does not like things or have preferences, but the current mission is definitely . . . a more appropriate use of resources than many it can remember (and it can remember many, too many, because the asset has not been wiped and it is glitching badly and the malfunction feels close, too close, and the asset blinks and suddenly it is leaning on the wall of the shower cubicle and the water is cold and there is a knocking on the door and a voice saying, “—dier? Soldi— Buck? Bucky! You okay in there? If you don’t say something I’m going to come in, okay? I—”)

“Acknowledged,” the Soldier says. Then turns off the shower, and repeats the word, louder.

The Captain is standing outside the door when the Soldier opens it, still dripping wet.

“Oh!” says the Captain, taking a step back. His eyes dip downwards, then back up, then settle on the rough seam between the asset and the weapon. “Um. Sorry, I— Uh. Dry off, and get dressed. Then meet me in the den.”

“Acknowledged,” says the Soldier, and turns to do so. The Captain lingers for slightly longer than he’d perhaps like the Soldier to acknowledge before moving away.

The Soldier’s new clothes are similar to the previously issued set; soft, loose cotton pants (black) and sleeveless top (charcoal). Plus thin, tight underwear (black), and a pair of strangely fuzzy socks with rubber grip treads on the soles. They turn out to be quite warm. The Soldier approves of the utility.

The Captain is, indeed, in the den when the Soldier goes looking. He’s standing to one side, leaning on the wet bar, seemingly staring at the countertop. Distressed again, the Soldier surmises, and so steps a little heavier on the plush carpet in warning.

The Captain hears and straightens, fixing the Soldier with a smile that is neither entirely false nor entirely genuine. This has been a trying day for the Captain, and the Soldier adopts a more deferential posture in response.

“Ready for orders.”

The Captain gives a not-quite laugh and gestures to an armchair. “Please, sit.”

The Soldier, very used to sitting in chairs to be debriefed by handlers, does so. The chair is significantly more comfortable than many before it.

“You did good work today, Soldier,” the Captain says. “I won’t lie, I wasn’t . . . entirely sure. What to expect. But . . . I’m pleased. Real pleased with how this turned out.”

Strange. The Soldier has heard similar words before, and more besides. The Soldier has shaped the century. Yet that seems so insignificant compared to the simple task of pleasing Steven Grant Rogers with eight hours of burpees and mustard-free sandwiches. The Soldier does not enjoy things, yet perhaps it would be accurate to say today has been . . . rewarding, in a way many previous missions were not.

“We’ve got one last thing to work on for today. It might . . . might be a little more difficult than what we’ve done before, I don’t really know.”

“Ready to comply,” the Soldier says, and means it. _Good work Soldier. I’m pleased. Good work._

“Do you . . . what was your first memory from this morning?”

“The asset awoke at 0453, got up, urinated, then returned to bed.” Then masturbated to thoughts of the Captain until 0535. Then cried until 0548. But these are things the Captain did not ask about, and things the malfunction does not want the Captain to know.

“Okay,” the Captain is saying. “So you . . . you remember stuff Bucky does. That’s good.”

This has never been considered good before, but it is not unexpected that the Captain would be different in this regard, and so the Soldier says nothing.

“I’ve read the— your files,” the Captain says. “They talk a lot about— about ‘glitches’ and ‘malfunctions’ if you’ve been, uh. Kept active for too long. Are you . . . are you experiencing, um. Any of that?”

The Captain is sitting on the coffee table in front of the Soldier. He’s leaning forward, elbows on his knees, slightly below the Soldier’s own eye height. Earnest. Deferential, almost. The Soldier knows this is a ploy, to put the Soldier at ease, but . . . but perhaps the earnestness is not entirely affected, either.

“The asset is experiencing extensive malfunction,” the Soldier says, slowly. It tries to keep the asset’s breathing steady, even as its heart speeds up and the weapon whirs in response.

The Captain notices, eyes flicking briefly towards the sound. The Soldier keeps the weapon’s fingers unclenched. Relaxed. Non-threatening.

“What . . . What does that mean, exactly? ‘Malfunction’? None of the files were clear. It is . . . is it your arm?”

“The weapon is fully operational.”

“Alright, that’s good. But..?”

“The asset requires reset,” the Soldier says, and the malfunction screams. The Soldier does not fear reset, but . . .

But. The malfunction does. Very much. Even if it does not truly think the Captain will order one.

“‘Reset’ . . .” The Captain scowls. “That . . . The, uh. Mind wipe, you mean?” Now it’s the Captain whose fists are clenched. Then, at the Soldier’s nod: “Okay. So . . . you’re remembering things? Is that’s what’s meant by a ‘glitch’?”

Another nod.

“Okay. Soldier, I know . . . I know this is different to what you’re used to, but your memories aren’t a ‘glitch’; they’re an important part of you. Some of them . . . they might be painful, or distracting, or make it difficult for you to obey certain orders. That’s why HYDRA used to— to try and remove them. But we aren’t going to do that any more.”

“Asset glitches impede operational function,” the Soldier explains. Slowly, and over the violent objection of the malfunction. The fingers of the weapon twitch. The Soldier forces them to be still.

“In the short term, yes,” the Captain says. “But in the long term, it will be . . . more efficient to have them.”

(_Says the fuck who, huh?_ screams the malfunction. _Who the fuck do you think you are to tell me that? What if I don’t _want_ to remember, Stevie? What then?_)

“—dier? Soldier!”

The Soldier blinks. It is staring at the ceiling, body arched taught and painful in the chair. It must have lost time, because the Captain is standing, hands on the Soldier’s flesh arm. Warm. Gentle. Very slowly, the Soldier relaxes the asset’s spine, drops back into the chair. The fingers of the weapon have torn a chunk of leather and stuffing from the chair’s arm. The Soldier tries to pat them back into place, uselessly.

“ . . . Hey,” the Captain says, soft and close. “You . . . you okay?”

“R-ready to comply,” the Soldier murmurs, because it is always the best response after . . . that.

“Jesus.” The Captain does not sound pleased, but sits back himself. Watching. “Jesus, okay. What . . . what that? It looked like you were having a damn seizure.”

“Malfunction.” The Soldier keeps the weapon and the asset still. “The asset . . . requires reset.”

The Captain is silent for a long time, assessing. The Soldier has been assessed by many people over the years. It never leads to anything good. Perhaps if the Soldier is quiet, keeps the asset and the weapon still, the Captain will not . . .

Will not . . . what? What is the Soldier afraid the Captain will _do_?

(_Burn you outta my goddamn head!_)

“Soldier?”

Not still. Not still enough.

“R-ready to comply,” the Soldier says.

The Captain sits back, exhales. Slaps his hands on his knees and seems to come to a decision.

“It’s been a long day,” he says. “You’ve done very well. You should be proud of yourself”—the Soldier is not proud, the Soldier is—”and I think it’s time for some rest. I know, before, they put you in— in cryo. But we don’t do that here. Instead, I want to try something else, okay?”

“Acknowledged.” Superfluous, but some handlers seem to appreciate the veneer of consent to their orders.

“This morning,” the Captain says, “I said some trigger words, and you . . . were activated. The book I got those from, they . . . didn’t have an equivalent phrase to reverse the process. I’d like to try and establish one.”

A trigger phrase to induce malfunction. That is . . . new. There are phrases for pain and paralysis and compliance. That the Soldier knows of. But never for . . . that.

“I think it happened before, didn’t it?” the Captain continues. “When we fought on the helicarrier.”

Blood. Blood and rage and panic and the sound of screaming metal and breaking bones and—

“Hey. Hey, it’s okay. Stay with me, Soldier.”

—and a big hand, gentle and warm, placed atop the twitching, whirring weapon.

The Soldier slows the asset’s breathing. In, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four. It almost works.

“The . . . person you were this morning. Bucky. I’d like him back now, if that’s okay? We’ll do some more training tomorrow, but now you get to rest. And it’s Bucky’s turn for a while.”

And the Captain is so warm, and so close, and so earnest, and the asset’s breath is huffing like train and its heart is rattling like a machine gun and its fist is twitching in its rage and it screams _fuckyoufuckyourogersyoufuckingfuck_ and—

And the asset’s spine goes taught, and the Soldier falls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> _Comme te po' capì chi te vò bene_   
_Si tu le parle 'mmiezzo americano?_   
_Quando se fa l'ammore sotto 'a luna_   
_Come te vene 'capa e di: "[I love you](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgFE5OQbt_g)!?"_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MCU canon post-2014? Dunno what you're talkin' 'bout mate...

“—thing gives me the fucking creeps. I thought they fucking neutralized it after Insight?”

Later. Sam is still zip-tied and on the ground, surrounded by half a dozen Nazi assholes. They’ve been told to hold position by the Winter Soldier, who’s vanished to parts unseen, for reasons unstated. The STRIKE team seems unclear on whether it should be taking or giving orders to the Soldier, though Agent Scar is on the side of taking them, and so his men, begrudgingly, follow.

“Soldier ain’t so bad,” growls Scar. “Saner than half the other chucklefuck commanders in this shitshow.”

“‘Saner’—? You saw what it did to fucking Jacobs except, oh wait. You didn’t. None of us did. Because it moved before we could fucking see it!”

Scar just shrugs. “Least it was clean. You ever end up working for someone like Brinkerhoff or Gerst, you learn to appreciate the little things.”

Sam spits, not even bothering to hide his disgust. “Fucking Nazi pieces of shit.”

The goons ignore him, which has been their M.O. since what Sam will now forever refer to as the Jacobs Incident.

“It still ain’t right, man,” Agent Panic is saying. “Taking orders from some kind of fucking— fucking robot or zombie or some shit.”

“Soldier ain’t a fucking zombie robot you dumb shit,” adds a third asshole. “Jace served under him before, right Jace?”

Scar, whose name is apparently Jace, shakes his head. “Not me,” he says. “My old C.O., Rick Masters. They were doing a clean-up back in Panama City in the 80s. Got messy, real messy. Whole team thought they were done for. Only reason Rick got out was Soldier showed up and fucking carried him one-handed to the extraction point, shooting Commie fucks with his other the whole way. Got a dressing-down for it by Control, too—he was apparently there on some other mission, only saw the STRIKE corpses by accident—but Rick never forgot that. And neither will I. There’s a reason they call him ‘Soldier’, not the Winter fucking Officer.”

And Sam thinks:

_Huh._

Steve had been convinced, absolutely convinced, there’d been something left in Barnes to save. They’d argued about it more than once. A lot more, in fact; Sam’s thought more than once it’s the reason Steve ghosted them, in the end. Went so deep not even Nat could dig him up. Part of the reason they’re here is trying to confirm he didn’t get vanished into some secret fucking HYDRA lab, because wouldn’t that just be a fucking thing? He and Barnes could be a matching pair while the rest of the world pissed itself in fear.

Out loud, he says:

“He’s a sergeant, actually. US Army.”

This earns him the immediate attention of six pairs of eyes. “The fuck you think you know about it?” snaps Panic.

Sam shrugs as best a man can with zip tied hands. “You try palling around for a year with Cap and Black Widow and see how many state secrets you pick up.” And because everyone is looking at Sam, none of them see the subject of their conversation drop silently down from the mezzanine behind them. Terrifying, how such a big guy is such heavy gear can move so quietly.

“You’re full of shit.”

“Don’t believe me, you can ask him yourself.” He nods at the blank, looming figure a bare foot behind Panic’s head. “Right, Jimmy?”

The reaction is, well. If Sam didn’t know any better, he’d say Barnes planned it, because the STRIKE team _flips_ when they notice him. Sam just laughs, because what else is he going to do? Third Asshole even makes to kick at him in irritation, but the muzzle of Barnes’s gun against his temple makes him reconsider.

“Sucks to be disposable, huh?” Sam asks him, grinning grim and cold. He doesn’t think of himself as a cruel man, usually, but it’s been a long year and he’s always prepared to make a few exceptions for Nazis.

Third backs off, replaced by Barnes, who dumps a pile of metal at Sam’s feet. It’s cuffs and shackles, connected by a chain, the sort of thing Sam’s seen used on prisoners, but in the kind of heavy, over-engineered design he’s come to associate with HYDRA and S.H.I.E.L.D.

He looks up. Barnes has pushed the goggles up onto his forehead but he’s still got the mask and he’s staring straight ahead. Sam sighs. “You know I’m not going to make this easy for you,” he decides.

This, as it turns out, is not really a problem; Barnes simply squats down and manhandles Sam into the cuffs like he’s putting a jumper on a recalcitrant toddler. Sam doesn’t struggle, just goes limp, and there’s one tense moment when Barnes whips out a wicked-looking black blade from apparently nowhere, but all he does with it is cut the zip tie he’d previously put around Sam’s wrists. It’s not exactly dignified but Barnes is coldly efficient, not cruel, and Sam’s been roughed up worse by cops at a traffic stop. Besides, when it’s done at least his hands are back around front, even if he can’t lift them above his waist without a whole bunch of awkward yoga. Barnes spends the entire time staring vacantly into the middle distance, to the point it’s almost impressive he can even see what he’s doing.

Maybe he’s just done this so often he doesn’t _have_ to look. Maybe HYDRA drilled him on it blindfolded before they fried his brains and threw him in the freezer. Sam can believe it.

The HYDRA assholes laugh throughout the entire ordeal, because of course they do, then more when Barnes hauls Sam to his feet one (metal) handed.

“If this is your idea of foreplay,” Sam says, “I can see why Steve’s so tense all the damn time.” A little mean, maybe, but he figures he’s owed. Barnes doesn’t even do much as twitch.

When he’s released, Sam has half a second to decide whether he wants to stand or keep up his sack-of-potatoes routine. In the end, he chooses the former, if only because he’s convinced the latter would simply end up with him thrown over Barnes’s shoulder like an actual sack, and there really is only so much bruising his ego’s prepared to take.

* * *

* * *

Steve figures, lying on the broken coffee table, staring up at the ceiling, that he should’ve expected the punch. The Soldier might have been tortured into compliant docility, but Bucky had never been one to take Steve’s shit. And this punch? This punch was definitely Bucky.

The Winter Soldier would’ve used his metal fist.

Steve laughs, because what else can he do? Situation normal: all fucked up. Just like they used to say, and boy howdy but is it. Steve laughs because his other options are either to cry or to scream.

“F-fuck. You,” comes Bucky’s machine-gun staccato, from somewhere up above. Somehow, even without shoes, he manages to stomp his way across the room.

“Don’t stay out too late!” Steve sing-songs. “I’m making pasta!”

The only reply he gets is the slam of the front door.

* * *

Of course, it isn’t actually funny; it’s terrifying. Steve spent a whole day ordering his best friend around like Stark with his robots. He deserves the ache in his jaw and the ominous silence that seeps through Fury’s safehouse, and every single muscle in Steve’s science-warped body is screaming at him to chase Bucky into the dark. To not let him get away, again. It’s like that quote; losing a friend once is tragic, losing him four times is carelessness.

He can’t, though. He knows he can’t. Bucky has to be here by choice; has to know he can leave if he wants to. None of it works, otherwise.

So, Steve makes pasta. Nothing fancy, because most of the safehouse’s food is either dried or canned or torn out of the garden, but there’s a little town not too far down the mountainside and Steve figures they can head out and pick up a few things on Sunday. On their rest day. That they’ll absolutely have, because Bucky will come back.

While the sauce simmers, Steve inspects the table. Its only one leg that’s snapped off and he thinks he can probably fix it with some filler and some nails. Bucky—the old Bucky—would definitely have been able to fix it, but Steve isn’t sure how much this new version remembers of any of that. Hell, their old life in Brooklyn feels like a hundred years ago to _Steve_, and he was asleep for most of the gap. He can’t imagine what cold and dark and yawning chasm of time exists in Bucky’s head.

Maybe Steve will get Soldier to help him. Less likelihood of immediate sassing and, near as Steve could tell, Soldier did seem to enjoy the experience of being praised for following simple, benign orders. Steve had been counting on as much, based on . . . things. The book. Files. The phrase “operant conditioning” had appeared a lot. In more recent files it’d been “freeze-fawn”. Soldier’s survival hinges on pleasing his handlers. He got very good at it. Eventually.

And yet, Steve’s jaw still aches. Steve’s jaw still aches and he isn’t dead and drowned at the bottom of the Potomac, because for all they did, every torture they tried, HYDRA still never managed to erase everything. You can train a man to believe he’s a robot, Steve thinks—Steve hopes—but you can never really make it so. People just don’t work like that. Hell, after time spent with JARVIS and Dum-E, Steve’s not even convinced _robots_ work like that.

A few years back—or decades, technically, but who’s counting—Bucky had dragged Steve to see a play. Just some local amateur thing, but Buck had been almost bursting with joy. _It’s robots, Stevie,_ he’d said, eyes bright and shining. _The first ones!_

Those robots hadn’t been made of metal—-that’d come later, Buck had explained, at length—but rather flesh and bone, grown in a factory. Clones, Steve supposes they’d be called now, because this new century is strange and terrible and, more importantly, weirdly derivative.

They’d rebelled, in the end. Those flesh-and-blood robots, who of course hadn’t really been robots so much as metaphors, for capitalism or socialism or nationalism or all three. They’d rebelled and they’d _won_. That doesn’t happen so much in film nowadays, Steve’s noticed. Maybe it should.

He puts out two plates of pasta. Is just turning around holding them, in fact, when Bucky reappears. Literally so; last Steve had looked the kitchen table had been empty. Now it’s not. He doesn’t startle in response—thank you, Natasha—instead just puts one plate in front of Bucky, earning a scowl in return.

“Eat up,” he says. “There’s plenty more.” He clasps Buck on the shoulder before he’s thought to stop himself. It’s so automatic, something they’d done so casually back Before. But this Bucky isn’t that Bucky and flinches, just a little bit, every time. So Steve tries to keep his hands to himself, even if all he really wants is to cling and hug and never, ever let go again.

(Soldier, on the other hand, does not flinch. Steve doesn’t know whether it’s because he’s been conditioned not to or . . . some other reason. But he doesn’t, either way.)

Bucky eats, silent and resentful, but obviously ravenous with his too-hollow cheeks. At least he trusts Steve not to poison him, which is something.

Steve’s hand is still cold from Bucky’s, well, metal, so he goes into the den to pull a blanket from the couch. Bucky’s arm—Steve refuses to think of it as “the weapon”, even if that’s how the files described it—is surprisingly warm, usually. Warm and smooth and faintly humming; obviously alive, even when it’s still. But nights are still cool in the mountains, and the metal is more responsive to ambient temperature than flesh. Bucky is still only wearing the sleeveless tank and tracksuit pants Steve has given Soldier. No jacket, no shoes. He must be freezing, even if he hides it well.

He doesn’t protest when Steve drapes the blanket over his shoulders, movements obvious and telegraphed. Just grunts, and goes back to eating.

“I hope it’s okay,” Steve says, sitting behind his own plate. “It’s Sam’s recipe. He’s been trying to teach me to cook quote-unquote ‘real food’.” Steve takes a bite. It is pretty good. The sauce is simple; tinned tomatoes and cream and some scavenged herbs, spiced up with olives and thin-sliced smoked ham. But it works and, importantly, there’s a lot of it.

Steve chats for a while, about nothing in particular, starting with the first time he went to a supermarket after waking up. (“There’s just . . . so much. So much and so much wasted. And no one really thinks about it. Just . . . accepts it.”) Then films he’s seen and been forced to see, and things that’ve changed in New York. (“I . . . I don’t know if it’s home any more, Buck. That’s why I moved to D.C. I just had to . . . be somewhere else for a while.”) Bucky says nothing but he does listen, and when he gets up to get more food he offers to do so for Steve, as well. It isn’t like it was, Steve thinks, but nothing ever is and, God, but it’s _good_. It’s everything Steve never thought he’d have again, not since the war or the train or the bridge. Yet, here they are.

After dinner, they wash up, which is definitely easier than it used to be, even with five times the utensils. (“Dishwashers!” Steve says, pointing at the open door of the appliance in question. “Everyone has one of these things now, can you believe it?”) Steve’s busy organizing the spoons in the dishwasher’s cutlery drawer _just so_ when he notices Bucky has stopped scrubbing the saucepan. He’s just holding it in the water, eyes unfocused and staring at nothing in the room.

“Buck?”

Silence, long enough Steve almost thinks he isn’t going to get an answer. But Bucky’s throat and jaw are working, like he’s trying to regurgitate words letter at a time to assemble piece by piece in his mouth. So Steve waits, patient, and is eventually rewarded with:

“You. You think you can. Reprogram it.”

_It_, not _him_. Always.

“I know I can.” It’s been done before. There were . . . instructions. Steve isn’t following them.

Another long, too-still pause. Then: “Okay. If. If it’s you. Okay.”

It isn’t. Steve isn’t doing this to program himself as Pierce 2.0, that’s not what any of this is about. But it’s enough for Bucky to assume it is. For now.

* * *

* * *

Barnes blows up the facility. Sam would be pleased, normally, except he was actually supposed to be there gathering intel. Intel that’s now a pile of flaming shrapnel and rubble at the bottom of the valley below.

Jace and his dickholes are obviously uncomfortable with the destruction, but prepared to accept it on the basis that, if the Winter Soldier is doing clean-up, the orders and reasons emerge well above their pay grade. Barnes, as per usual, says nothing either way. Just looms menacingly at the distant destruction, flames reflecting off his once-again lowered goggles.

After that, they march. HYDRA apparently know who Sam is, and rib him relentlessly about being Air Force, of all things. He’s heard it all before a thousand times—most recently care of Steven Grant Rogers, no less—but something about the taunts coming from paramilitary fascists legitimately gets to him in a way the teasing usually doesn’t. That, and the fact the shackles mean he can’t move more than an old-man shuffle, and the ground isn’t exactly ballroom smooth, _and_ the fact Jace keeps the pace just slightly too fast . . .

Yeah. Sam’s maybe getting a little tetchy.

It takes twenty minutes for them to get to the log. They’ve been following a deer trail through the woods, winding more around the mountainside than over it, and things are getting increasingly more precarious. Sam’s already stumbled at least half a dozen times, and the only reason he hasn’t planted himself face-first in the mud is that every time Barnes’s goddamn metal arm whips out to pull him back. And now . . . this.

It’s a fallen tree, because they’re in a forest and of course it is. Not even really an insurmountable obstacle, which Panic demonstrates by hauling himself up and over it with ease. Except, to do so, he has to lift his hands above his waist.

Once he’s over the other side, he grins straight at Sam, mean and cold. “C’mon, Tweetie-bird,” he says. “Use your wings.” The others laugh.

There’a no way around; there’re hemmed in by a sharp drop on one side and too-dense ticket on the other. But the fallen trunk is twisted, enough that there’s a gap beneath it. Big enough for a person to crawl through, if they didn’t mind the mud and the bugs and the spiders.

And, thing is? Same done worse. Way worse. Of course he has; he’s a fucking PJ. They did worse than this at Kirtland, before they’d even strapped on their big boy wings. But it’s . . . different. With six leering Nazi fucks, practically popping tents at the idea of watching a black man squirm in the dirt.

Sam is proud. He knows that. He has reason to be, and he isn’t ashamed of it. And this—

And this is Sam, suddenly in motion.

For one mad second Sam thinks maybe he really _has_ grown wings. Just . . . shapeshifted into a fucking falcon to jet the fuck outta there. Except no, of course it isn’t that. Of course it’s just James fucking Barnes, arm around Sam’s waist, doing a _fucking standing jump_ over the chest-high fucking log, because why the fuck not.

They land on the other side, and Barnes puts Sam down, so carefully Sam doesn’t even stumble. He doesn’t dare make eye contact with Panic or the others, but from the awkward shuffling he can tell they’re feeling chastened by the display. Or afraid.

“You should do CrossFit,” Sam tells Barnes, while the others haul themselves (far less elegantly) over the log. He’s babbling, maybe a little. Voice just there to fill the silence and calm the jitters beneath his skin. Natural, after a jolt like that. “You’d be great at it. There’s even a WOD named after you. All the Commandos have one, actually. It’s how your boy got into it.”

By Steve’s telling, it’d been started by Tony Stark, of all people, trying to rile Steve up by listing all the things that’d been named after him in his absence. Steve’d gone to a box to check things out, which had lasted for all of a month, right up until some idiot put himself in hospital with rhabdomyolysis trying to keep up. Sam, who’d known way too many burpee-addicted assholes back in the military and had hated the whole thing before it was cool, had just rolled his eyes at the story.

Barnes, of course, reacts neither to this story nor Steve’s name. He just looms, staring at nothing, like some kind of brooding teenage Darth Vader, until they’re all ready to start moving again.

“He basically went crazy looking for you, you know that, right? Your boy.” Barnes has resumed his position, one step behind and one to the right. “Honestly, after he ghosted us . . . We, me and Nat, we kinda hoped it was ‘cause he’d found you. That you were both holed up in some cabin somewhere, Lindy Hopping or fucking like bunnies or whatever it is you old timers do.” This is something Sam’s debated endlessly with Nat and about which Steve has been frustratingly closed-mouthed. Not about the liking guys part; Steve’s not exactly loud and proud, but he’s not a closet case, either, and will joke around and check men out when he’s “off duty”, as it were. And he clearly loved Barnes; that he isn’t shy about. But he’s never said whether he was _in love_, or if Barnes returned the favor. Plus, the whole Peggy thing. That was—still is—definitely real, so . . .

Point being, Sam’s never figured it was his business. So he didn’t ask, Steve didn’t tell, and now . . . this.

“He would move mountains for you, you know? Whatever you think HYDRA’s got over you, over him . . . whatever. Steve’ll tear the whole damn world apart to end it and to bring you home.”

Up ahead, Jace snorts. “Give it up, chief,” he says. “The Soldier don’t defect.”

This, as Sam happens to know, is incorrect. The Soldier _frequently_ defects, or tries to, and is hauled back with extreme prejudice. According to the info they’ve been able to dredge up, it’s happened multiple times over the years; everything from Barnes just going AWOL after missions, wandering around New York in a daze, to more active attempts complete with weapons and a death toll. The methods changed over the years but the impulse to flee was something HYDRA had never managed to fully erase. Not that they didn’t keep trying. And succeeding. Still:

“These assholes really don’t know shit, huh?” Sam says, not to Jace.

Barnes, as per usual, say nothing at all.

* * *

* * *

The Soldier is having a very strange week. Not unpleasant. Just . . . strange.

The asset is woken around 0600, give or take half an hour or the ability to sleep the night before. It is not wiped. Instead, the malfunction consumes breakfast with the Captain then sits comfortably in one of the leather armchairs around the sofa. It surrenders peacefully when the Captain speaks the trigger words, and summons the Solder into the asset’s body.

Afterwards, the Captain directs the Soldier through a varying series of exercises. On the second day, these include outdoor jogging on the trails around the safehouse. The Soldier remembers some from the malfunction’s . . . attempted escape, but no punishment or correction ever occurs. Instead, the Captain seems to merely enjoy taking the Soldier for runs. The Soldier, of course, does not enjoy things, but . . . running with the Captain is . . . invigorating. Excellent maintenance for the asset.

There’s a lake not too far from the house. The spring air is warm but the water is snowmelt, which doesn’t stop the Captain stopping on the grassy bank to strip his clothes. “I’m getting in,” he announces, pulling his shirt over his head. “You can stay here or come too.”

This latter is somewhat muffled but, more importantly, large swathes of the Captain’s skin are suddenly exposed. Smooth and pale rose gold, soft and firm and still mostly hairless, even after the serum. Still surprising, to see those thick arms and that tight, tapered waist instead of something thin and delicate. Like one of those old statues come to life, sculpted to a perfection bordering on uncanny as if—

“—ldier?”

The Soldier blinks. Then blinks again. The Captain is talking. The Captain asked a question. The Captain asked and the Soldier missed it, and the Captain had said the glitches, the memories, weren’t bad but that had been before the Soldier missed a question and—

“All right.” The Captain is smiling, coy and pleased. Standing tall and proud and completely nude, and the Soldier doesn’t want but suddenly it seems mission-critical that the Soldier taste that groove along the Captain’s hip. Taste it all the way down through rough curls and onto the smooth, hot, firm flesh beneath.

“Won’t be long,” the Captain promises. Then he turns—a view just as mission-imperative, and perhaps more so, than the front—and dives into the water.

It is cold, and the Captain yelps, laughing. He does nothing in particular for a few moments, seemingly just enjoying the raw pleasure of the activity, before settling into an actual swim. The Soldier watches. Thinks about the way the water glimmers against the Captain’s skin. It is . . . distracting.

Because the asset is glitching, is _remembering_, the Soldier knows it has seen the Captain in this way before; in both this body and the previous one. There are . . . memories there. Desires. Of mouthing dusky nipples and settling a slim form within the warm V of the asset’s thighs. Later, things morph into being held down by too-strong arms and opened with too-large fingers. The Soldier does not know if these are things that actually happened or merely things Sergeant Barnes wished would have happened. The malfunction worsens the more the Soldier examines this strange jumble of past experiences, and as it is not yet time to surrender to the malfunction, the Soldier makes its own, new memories instead. Of returning from a well-executed mission, finishing the briefing and hearing, _Good work, Soldier._ And because this is not real, is simply a scenario the Soldier runs because it is efficient to do so, the Captain is naked as he says this. Naked and sprawled, cupping thick cock and heavy balls with one hand as he says, _Would you like to receive your reward?_ Because the Captain would always ask, and so the Soldier would eagerly fall to the asset’s knees beneath the Captain, and take the Captain’s hot, hard dick in the asset’s mouth and—

The Soldier suddenly has a strong mission requirement to sit down. The Captain is not the sort of handler who makes the Soldier stand at attention for hours or days or until the asset collapses, and has repeatedly instructed the Soldier that the asset is to be cared for. Currently, sitting on the grass—cool, soft, slightly damp and earthy smelling—is doing so.

The Captain’s orders regarding the asset are novel, but shockingly effective. It’s only been six days and yet the asset is already stronger and sturdier than the Soldier is used to. The sexual urges are part of that; the Soldier knows it has experienced them before and previous handlers have controlled them with drugs and . . . other deterrents. The Captain’s methods are unorthodox in other areas and perhaps in this also, though currently the Soldier is failing to see how being . . . distracted by thoughts of sucking the soft skin of the Captain’s throat will improve overall operational effectiveness.

The Soldier knows it should mention these concerns but . . . if the Captain determines this state is undesirable and moves to correct it . . .

The Soldier does not have attachments and so does not feel loss. And yet . . .

The Captain emerges from the water in a spray of diamond-glitter drops and miles and miles of sun-kissed flesh. He grins at the Soldier and comes over to flop down on the grass nearby, sprawled in the sun and still soaking wet. “Kinda occurred to me halfway through I didn’t bring a towel,” he says. “Or clean clothes.”

The Captain’s arms are covered in goose flesh. The Soldier has no preferences but finds the cold . . . operationally inefficient, and assumes the Captain is the same. The Soldier is only wearing thin athletic clothing but the asset is warm and perhaps the Soldier could drape it across the Captain in an effort to share that? Would such a gesture be approved by the Captain, even unasked for? The Soldier is unused to doing things without orders but the Captain is different to other handlers and appears to encourage spontaneity and initiative. Besides, they are technically on a mission (objective: morning jog) and the Soldier has always had at least some degree of operational leeway.

And then the Captain says:

“Maybe we could just . . . stay here.” He is still lying on his back in the sun, eyes closed and mouth curved into a careful smile. “The whole damn planet must be looking for us by now. There’s no reason we have to let them find us. We were dead for seventy years and the world survived without us”—this is not entirely true, though the Soldier does not correct it—”so maybe I can just . . . chat to Nick. Tell him we’re staying. You can go jogging and, I don’t know. Fix cars? And I can paint again, and it’ll just be . . . nice. Real nice. Retirement.”

The Captain is, of course, not actually talking to the Soldier when he says this. The Soldier is not needed for retirement; for painting or fixing cars or sitting in the sun doing nothing. The Captain is talking to the ghost of Sergeant Barnes. And Sergeant Barnes is not here but the asset is, and perhaps that’s not so bad. Before, the Soldier being unneeded meant wipes and cryo and worse. Meant hours or days or weeks of operational ineffectiveness. Now, it’s a hot shower and a comfortable chair. It’s surrendering to the malfunction and it’s warm dreams of being Bucky Barnes.

It would be an acceptable mission, to sleep forever in that way.

“It’s a madhouse out there, you know?” the Captain is saying. “After I woke up . . . Jesus. Felt like I was still blinking the dust outta my eyes when suddenly I’m getting put back in uniform ‘cept it ain’t Krauts we’re shooting but _aliens_. I’m still getting used to fucking cell phones and it’s _aliens_. And everyone’s just . . .” He makes a gesture with his hands, big and vague. “‘Oh, aliens sure okay. Avengers assemble!’ Like this is some normal fucking thing now. Took me months afterwards to realize it wasn’t. That everyone was just as outta their fucking depth as I was.” A pause. Then the Captain laughs, harsh and humorless. “Fuck. It’s good to curse again, you know? Fuckitty fucking _fu-uu-uu-uu-uck_!” This last screamed into the sky. Then, quieter: “I said ‘damn’ once, early on. Tony made such a big deal out of it—’Cap did a swear! Cap did a swear! Isn’t that a national crime?’—I never dared do it again. People have . . . they have such weird ideas about us, Buck. I guess they always did, about me—about Captain America—but . . . God. I don’t even know. Decades for them and barely a handful of years for me. It’s FUBAR, through and through.”

The Soldier does not disagree with this sentiment.

“But,” the Captain adds. “Listen to me. You’re the last person I should be dumping this on.”

“It’s . . . okay.” The Soldier’s voice surprises both of them, but the words are out and the Captain is staring, so: “It’s okay.” The Soldier is very, very good at listening. And listening to the Captain is . . . acceptable.

So is the Captain smiling, and shifting so the side of his temple presses against the asset’s knee. “Thanks, B— Soldier.” The Captain almost covers the slip this time. Almost. “I’m just . . . God, I’m glad you’re here. I’m so fucking sorry about what you went through, but . . . but I wouldn’t trade it. Selfish fucking asshole.” This latter directed at himself.

The Soldier does not think he is selfish. There are many things now the Soldier remembers and many more it wishes it did not. But this—being here, with the Captain, in this moment by the side of this lake—is something it would keep.

* * *

They fall into a routine. For six days a week the Soldier is woken by the Captain, and together they do CrossFit and go for runs. Sometimes, the Captain simply has the Soldier hold still (“Still-ish. Shift around if you start getting aches or cramps.”) in front of sketchbook or canvas.

The rest of the time, the Soldier dreams, or sleeps. When dreaming, Bucky Barnes eats breakfast and dinner, spending time with the Captain or not. Sometimes, he merely curls up on the porch swing outside and sobs. He gets away with this twice before the Captain notices, and joins him on the swing, stroking Barnes’s back and making soothing sounds.

The asset grows in strength and stamina, to the point that, even without the weapon’s intervention, it rivals that of the Captain. The Captain, of all things, seems pleased by this development. One day, he takes the Soldier into the forest and watches as, under instruction, the Soldier fells trees with a single blow from the weapon. They then variously chop and tear the logs into firewood. Spring has come but the evenings are still cool and Barnes loathes being cold. The Captain does not begrudge him making fires in the safehouse’s hearth, even suggesting they bring back marshmallows from the market.

Saturdays are market days. On these days, the Soldier sleeps, and the Captain ventures to the nearby village to purchase groceries. After the first time—after it’s become plainly clear the Captain will not restrict the Soldier’s movement—Barnes travels with him. The experience is nerve-wracking. Barnes speaks Romanian though does not remember how, and spends much of the trip buried deep inside his own head, running through horrors both remembered and imagined. When he rouses enough to notice the outside world, he switches to a state of hyper-alert panic, scanning every face for malice and every room for ambushes and exits. He keeps his arm covered and his head down, hat pulled low and hair hanging across his face, and gets more suspicious looks for than than for anything else.

When they return to the house, Barnes retreats into his room for a whole day. This means he misses the Soldier’s schedule but the Captain does not press or punish him for it, merely leaves food at Barnes’s door and speaks through it without expecting answers.

The second trip to the village goes better, the third and fourth better still.

“You wanna stay here, huh?” Barnes asks the Captain. They’re walking back from that fourth trip, groceries in hand, and it is the first time Barnes has tried to continue a conversation the Captain began with Soldier.

This time, the Captain simply sighs. “It’d be nice. If . . . if you wanted to stay, I mean.”

Barnes shrugs. “Ain’t doing much else.” The malfunction’s burning fervor to destroy its former masters has ebbed since the Captain found it. Now, Barnes mostly spends his time feeling tired.

The Captain snorts. “Gee, way to make a fella feel like you want him around.” But he’s grinning, and he knocks his shoulder against Barnes’s in play.

Barnes doesn’t quite reciprocate, though doesn’t shy away, either, and they walk for a few more companionable steps before the Captain grows serious again and adds: “I probably . . . They’ll need me, eventually. Need Captain America. The next time there’s, God. Who knows. Aliens or killer robots or killer alien robots.”

“I still can’t believe. It was. F-fucking aliens,” Barnes mutters.

“I know!” The Captain is almost comically wide-eyed in relief. That someone has finally mentioned it.

“I think . . .” Barnes starts. Then stops. Then: “I think . . . They woke it up. They were. Arguing. Whether to deploy.”

“Soldier?”

“Yeah.”

“Would’ve helped.” The Captain huffs a breath. “Another sniper would’ve made a lot of difference.”

“They didn’t— Too risky. Because of you. P-Pierce pushed for nukes. Instead.” Barnes has pieced this together after the fact, half from Google, half from the asset’s glitched memory. The first few hours after cryo never really come back, but the asset remembers a period where it was woken and neither wiped nor deployed, simply half-defrosted then put away again. Words had filtered through—_New York_, _invasion_, _nuke it_—but it was only later, reading up on what he’d missed, that Barnes had made the connection.

“He hated that we sent the Tesseract back with Thor,” the Captain says, thoughtful. Then grimaces. “But, Jesus. The scepter.”

“The what?”

“I— Loki had a scepter. It, uh. Was . . . magic? I suppose?”

“Magic.”

The Captain shrugs, helpless. “Which . . . is real now too? Apparently?”

“I hate. This century.”

“The scepter could”—the Captain winces again—”uh . . . mind control. It was magic mind control.”

Barnes . . . does not know what to feel about that, and so settles for feeling, for saying, nothing.

“Jesus,” the Captain continues. “I have to— Nick. I have to call Nick.”

The Soldier does not know if the Captain ever does this, nor to which “Nick” the Captain refers (Barnes assumes Fury, who is supposed to be dead but, then again, so is the Captain). The Soldier does not second-guess missions, only prepares to deploy when they approach.

* * *

And then, a month after the Captain wakes the Soldier for the first time, the routine changes.

“I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” the Captain says. He’s still sitting on the coffee table in front of the Soldier’s armchair, hands clasped between his knees. “About who I’m working for.”

The asset’s heart speeds up, just a little, the malfunction twitching in its fingers despite the Soldier’s best efforts to keep them still.

“I gave you a transfer code,” the Captain continues. “But it wasn’t for me. Think of me as a . . . field commander. But I’m not your handler. Your actual handler . . . you can’t meet him, not exactly. But I think you know him. Very well, in fact.” The Captain smiles, and the Soldier feels the sweat beading on the asset’s palms.

“Don’t worry, Soldier,” the Captain says. “You’re done good work. And everything is going to be okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The play Steve is remembering is, of course, _R.U.R._, which was showing in various long-running productions in New York in the 20s and 30s. Because it is, indeed, balls old, you can [read it here](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59112); it is pretty startling that basically the only thing that's changed between it and modern robot uprising stories is that the robots generally no longer win...
> 
> _Revolution means change, don't look at me strange_  
_So I can't repeat what other rappers be sayin'_  
_You don't stand for something, you fall for anything_  
_Harder than you think, [it's a beautiful thing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEPrO1Awp9w)._


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mild **content warning** for assholes being racist, Sam saying lots of naughty words, plus some consensual sexytimes that feature a brief mention of past sexual abuse.

They march the entire day, down muddy slopes and over rivers and up rocky inclines. Sam hasn’t really done anything like it since training—on deployment they were mostly in the desert—and definitely not while in chains. The whole experience, in a word, sucks. In no small part due to HYDRA’s asshole jeering, coupled with Barnes’s weirdly attentive, creepy stoicism.

When it finally gets dark, they make camp. The Assholes have apparently come prepared for this, and unpack bedrolls and pup tents. It’s not exactly cold but it’s not exactly dry, either, and Sam is preparing himself for an uncomfortable night when Barnes hands him a silver emergency blanket, produced apparently from nowhere.

“Thanks,” Sam says, because his mother didn’t raise no barbarian, even as he eyes Barnes skeptically. Dude hasn’t taken off any of his kit or even sat down, and Sam gets the feeling he’s just going to loom over them all night like a Kevlar-clad gargoyle clutching an M16.

The STRIKE assholes apparently think this too, and have several hushed arguments over whether to set up a watch rotation of leave it to Barnes to cover. Sam wonders what the hell they’re worried about out here on Nowhere Mountain; anti-fascist bears?

Sam also wonders whether the Winter Soldier would win a wrestling match with a bear. Then has to wince at the irony when he remembers the battered old plush toy, stuffed in a cupboard at Mom’s.

There’s a fire. The Assholes crack open MREs and joke about the contents. Just as Sam’s about to settle in for a night of being hungry and damp, Barnes dumps a ration pack at Sam’s feet.

“The hell were you even keeping that?” Sam eyes Barnes’s outfit. It technically does leave much to the imagination, but almost exclusively in the _oh god where will it hurt me?_, as opposed to the _so that’s what’s under there_, department. “You got a hollow arm or something?”

This, of course, earns no response. So Sam just drinks his carbohydrate electrolyte beverage and eats his patriotic cookies while the chicken pesto pasta reheats.

* * *

Because Sam is not, in fact, a cyborg super assassin, ten hours later, dinner re-manifests itself in the obvious way.

“I gotta piss,” Sam announces to no one in particular.

It’s dawn, barely, and the Assholes are rousing themselves for another day of, Sam assumes, marching to wherever the fuck it is they’re marching to.

Panic is closest and he eyes Sam, petty and mean, sneering: “No one’s stopping you, Tweetie.”

Sam sighs, and stands up. He’s halfway through trying to figure out the best way of getting his dick out through the damn cuff chain when a hand descends onto his shoulder and nearly solves his problem for him then and there.

“Jesus fuck. Warm a guy, will you?”

Barnes says nothing, stares at nothing. Just gives Sam a little shove and takes half a step closer.

“Yeah, yeah. Okay.”

Honestly, Sam doesn’t know what worse; trying to piss in front of a half-dozen Nazi fucks or trying to piss alone in the woods with Mister Serial Killer 1945-2015. Barnes leads him just far enough away from the camp that Sam really is seriously starting to worry about his life prospects, but then they stop and . . . Okay. Apparently it really just is potty time. So. Sam does. It takes longer than it should—his body really, _really_ does not want to perform, as it were, with Sergeant Murder Eyes staring a thousand miles over his shoulder—but he gets it done with minimal chain-related interference.

Then turns. And nearly screams a second time.

“How the _fuck_ you move so quiet, man? That is not natural,” says Sam’a mouth, before his eyes process what he’s seeing.

Barnes has pushed up his goggles and unclipped his mask. He still has that creepy, dead-eyed expression but under that he looks a lot . . . healthier than Sam remembers. Pinker cheeks, less shadows beneath his eyes. Even his hair, now that Sam’s thinking about it, looks suspiciously like the hair of a white boy well-acquainted with conditioner.

Barnes is holding something out. A folded piece of paper. For one brief, bizarre moment Sam thinks he’s being offered TP, of all things, but . . . no. The paper’s obviously been torn from a notebook. It’s cream, not white, and when Sam takes it he recognizes the thin, smooth feel of a Moleskine journal.

The paper is slightly damp and reeks of unwashed Winter Soldier, and when Sam unfolds it it contains a message in tiny, neat, comic book style printing.

The message reads:

_Soldier’s with me. Will explain later, just play along for now. _

Then a little doodle of a falcon and a metal-armed teddy bear, standing back-to-back and looking fierce. Then, beneath that:

_P.S. Sorry._

Sam can even imagine Steve’s shit-eating wince as he wrote that, too.

_Fuck you, Rogers,_ Sam does not say aloud.

Instead, he hands the note back to Barnes, who has a hand out like he’s expecting it. Barnes crumples the whole thing into a ball and swallows it faster than Sam can blink, which is certainly one way of maintaining opsec and explains the mask thing. Watching it also makes Sam gag, and deliberately try not to imagine the circumstances that taught Barnes to dry-swallow wads of paper like he’s popping aspirin.

_“Soldier,”_ Sam suddenly thinks. _Not “Barnes.” The note called him Soldier, right?_

Barely seconds and already it feels weirdly dream-like. Like something Sam could’ve imagined after a day of panic and a night of no sleep. Particularly when Barnes (Soldier?) has finished clipping his face back in place, never once breaking character.

_“Explain later” my ass!_ Sam, once again, does not say out loud. _Better have a damn good explanation for this shit! _

“Shoulda stayed at the goddamn VA,” Sam says instead. “Always knew jogging was bad for you.”

Barnes just holds out his hands again in response, fists together, wrists upwards. Sam gets the picture and copies the gesture; it leaves the cuff chains pointing up, and Barnes grasps the base of one in his flesh hand. He does something to it—pushing it in, twisting it _just so_—and the cuff pops open.

Sam’s eyes go very wide.

Barnes clicks the cuff closed again, then nods at Sam, who repeats the gesture to prove that he can. It’s trickier with his hands bound but the whole rig has obviously been designed for this, and he gets it after some fiddling. The repeats it on the other side, just because. Barnes just watches, blank and still.

_I hate this spy shit,_ Sam does not say, as he pops the cuffs closed once more.

Then they both turn and, in dead silence, head back to the others.

* * *

Once again, they march. Sam spends the time imagining all the inventive ways he’s going to murder Steven Grant Rogers once they get out of this shitshow, whatever “this shitshow” happens to be, because no one’s bothered to fill Sam in on _that_ little detail, either. Maybe Barnes will help Sam in his revenge. Surely there is no person, on Earth or off it, more totally over Rogers’s shit than his childhood pal and cyborg murderbot, Bucky freakin’ Barnes. Sam’ll have to ask for Barnes’s freelance rates.

Some time around noon-ish, one of the STRIKE assholes—the one who seems in charge of the comms—gets confirmation of some kind of meet-up, and they start marching with more purpose.

“Fuckin’ mercs,” Panic is muttering. “We ain’t never had to use mercs before!”

Jace just shrugs. “Times change. Insight fucked us over. The brass still don’t know how to deal with it all.”

Panic shoots Sam a Manhattan-sewer-system level look. Sam just grins back and gives him a thumbs up. “You’re welcome.” If any of these assholes think Sam’s sorry about anything . . . well. They’re assholes.

“Cut off one head . . .” Panic warns, in what Sam assumes is an impression of an ominous voice.

“Y’all do know Hercules kills that thing, right?” Sam is betting that they do, in fact, not know this. “Like, that absolutely happens. Chops those heads right off, seals the stumps with fire.” Sam laughs, like he’s just thought of something funny. “Kinda like what y’all just did, right? Blow up the base, burn it down. Boom. Head gone, no more HYDRA.”

“Fuck you,” is Panic’s reply.

“But, hey. Maybe mythology isn’t your strong suit. Always did wonder why you called yourself ‘HYDRA’ then put the goddamn Kraken on your logo.”

“Yeah, yuk it up, birdshit boy,” Panic sneers. “Won’t be laughing when the Sokovians get their—”

“Enough,” Jace snaps.

Sam just rolls his eyes. “We know about your little Sokovian project,” he announces. It is, of course, a bald-faced lie. But at the end of this—when they all totally escape victorious and unharmed—that it one hundred percent the first place they’ll start looking. For . . . something.

What the fuck even is a Sokovian? Is it aliens? It sounds like aliens. Sam’s betting it’s more aliens. He makes a note to Google it, first chance he gets.

“Psst,” he says to Barnes. “Don’t suppose your arm gets 3G?”

Either Barnes’s arm does not, in fact, get 3G or it does, but Barnes doesn’t want Sam using up his data. Either way, apparently being on the same side maybe does not result is more chattiness. Or eye contact. God, Sam is totally going to murder Steve.

It’s two, maybe three hours until they get to the meet-up. Sam knows it’s the meet-up because it’s on a muddy backroad with a bunch of black humvees. Extremely Serious men in combat gear are standing around the vehicles, holding machine guns and not looking suspicious at all.

The lead guy is wearing what looks like a cheap goth rip-off of Stark’s get-up, paint scratched up on the helmet and chest to kind of look like a skull and crossbones. His stance shifts as he sees them approach, from bored to very, very interested in a way Sam both dislikes and finds vaguely familiar. More-so when they get close enough to hear him say:

“Aw, if it isn’t half of Cap’s little squad. _And_ the defrosted dead. Keep this up and I’m gonna end up with the whole set.”

And what Sam says is:

“Rumlow.”

They knew he’d escaped. Nat’d got that info months ago, and they’d had it on the todo list back before Steve’d gone AWOL. It just hasn’t been the priority. Nothing had, other than Barnes, and they’d kind of assumed Rumlow would turn up in some base or bolt-hole somewhere, and they’d deal with him then. Guess they’d been right. More-or-less.

“Wilson.” The mask hides most of Rumlow’s face but Sam can still tell the asshole is smirking. His eyes are visible and the skin around them looks pretty messed up. Sam can’t bring himself to feel bad about it. Rumlow made his bed; Sam just tucked him in.

“Hear you’re freelance, now,” Sam says. “How’s that feel? Being a traitor twice over?” He turns to Jace. “You know this asshole used to be HYD—” is as far as he gets.

New threads or not, Rumlow is still Rumlow, and the stun baton is arcing before Sam’s even finished. Rumlow is fast but Barnes is faster, and the resulting scuffle ends in the terrifying sight of Barnes holding the muzzle of a P226 under Rumlow’s chin with a too-steady left hand while the rest of his body convulses from the active baton he’s holding in his right.

There are also, suddenly, a lot of guns being pointed. In all directions.

“Guess you get special treatment, chief,” Jace says after a moment. “Last guy who tried anything on the collateral got his brains blown out before he could blink.”

Rumlow’s eyes flick to Jace. “Oh, we go way back.” Then, to Barnes: “I would ask if this brings back memories, but . . . well.” A pause. “Stand down, Soldier.”

Barnes does not. Blood has started dripping from the bottom of his mask, and Rumlow scowls.

“Chief, we don’t got time for your shit,” Jace growls. “Back off. Don’t touch the prisoner, don’t touch Soldier; you can’t afford the repair bill on either. Just do your fuckin’ jobs.”

It’s not a request; it’s a command, and Sam sees the exact moment Rumlow realizes he is not, in fact, actually in charge. He’s the hired help. Expendable. His men realize it, too. They don’t lower their guns before being told, but fingers are definitely moved away from triggers all the same.

One breath. Two. Three. Then:

“Fine.” The baton clicks off.

Barnes doesn’t quite collapse, but it’s close. Sam tries not to think about it—about why the guy seems so used to holding still while getting fried—and instead makes an abortive move to help before he’s stopped by the cuffs.

Besides, Jace is already on it; propping Barnes up with a shoulder and helping him get the mask off. Barnes coughs a lot of blood when it is, and maybe other things besides. One of the other STRIKE still-assholes-but-momentarily-sympathetically-so brings tissues and water to help clean up. The others glare at Rumlow like he just kicked their favourite pet.

Rumlow, meanwhile, is staring at Sam. “How’s Cap?” he asks, conversational. Like he’s used to ignoring Barnes reeking of bacon and coughing up organs.

“Fine, last I heard.”

“Yeah? And when was that. Cause maybe I got an update for you.” As he says it, he swings something down from his shoulders. A bag. Big and black and heavy. Familiar. When he unzips it, Sam gets an awful clenched feeling in his gut.

And then Rumlow hauls out the shield—_the_ shield, Cap’s shield, scarred and burnt and defaced with a crudely-painted HYDRA logo—and his eyes curve up in a vicious grin.

“Ta da!” he says.

* * *

* * *

“You. Are f-fucking. Insane.”

Barnes says it to the sweat mats on the floor in the gym, from where he’s collapsed. He’s holding himself up, but barely, every muscle still convulsing from the inelegant crash of his scrambled brain and fucked-up body rejecting Steve’s latest scheme.

Steve says nothing in reply, but does help Barnes sit up, propping him against the weight rack and handing him a vacuum bottle filled with water. The clock on the wall reads 1:35 pm. Two hours better than yesterday.

Steve doesn’t even glance back to confirm it. He knows. Little punk.

“We’ll call it for today,” Steve says, after Barnes has his breath back under control and has downed half the water.

“F-fuck you,” Barnes says. “Like fuck we will. You s-started this. Finish it.”

“Buck—”

“_Fuck_ you. Don’t you f-fucking—” The screech of the water bottle is incredibly loud as it’s crushed in Barnes’s metal fist. They both stare at it. Very carefully, Barnes concentrates on unclenching each finger, servos shrieking and running so hot the bottle’s rubber cover is starting to melt.

“Just,” Barnes tries, softer this time, if not steadier. “Just. Do it.” The remains of the bottle thump to the floor, crushed and smoldering.

Steve sighs. “All right,” he says. Then, in his neat-but-accented Russian: “_Longing. Rusted—”_

* * *

Later. Everything hurts. Barnes is on the front porch, slumped over the rail. Ostensibly watching the sunset but actually the inside of his eyelids, still-damp hair dripping down his back and cheeks. He wonders if he should cut it. He wonders if he could, or if he cares enough to try.

Steve finds him, because of course he does.

“Hey.”

A mug is gently nudged in his direction, and Barnes sighs and takes it. It’s cocoa, complete with half-melted marshmallows floating in the top. For some reason, the sight makes him want to laugh. Or cry. He can’t decide which, so chooses neither.

“How’re you feeling?”

“Had worse.” Really, today barely rates a mention on the ol’ Bucky Barnes Shit Day-O-Meter. A two at most. He didn’t even piss himself.

Steve sighs. “You did good today, Buck. Real good. I—”

“S-save it. For the. F-fucking Soldier.”

“All right.”

Barnes drinks some cocoa, mostly because it’s there. It tastes good. Probably. Not like he can tell, not after spending so long on gruel and IV drips. His taste is so shot to shit the only way he can describe food nowadays is _so much_. Maybe that’s the only way he can describe _anything_. Just so fucking much.

“It wants to. F-fuck you. You know.” He doesn’t really know why he says it. Self-destructive tendencies, probably. He’s always had a bit of that in him, he thinks. Near as he remembers.

Steve drinks his own cocoa, not in any fucking hurry. Then: “That bother you?”

Barnes shrugs. Does it? Compared to every other fucking thing, _can_ it?

“It’s not illegal any more,” Steve says. “I dunno if you know that. We can even get married, back home.”

“What. Peggy turn you down?” Barnes knows she’s alive. She didn’t get two dates at the Smithsonian.

Of all things, Steve laughs. “Ah. Yup.” He pops the P, jiggling a little in the way Barnes still knows means he’s been embarrassed by a girl. “That she did.”

“Sap.”

“She had a whole life without me, Buck. A good life. I guess . . .” He pauses, then: “It was a long time, for her.”

“Not. For you.”

Steve shrugs. “Not yet,” he says.

Barnes doesn’t really know what to say about that. Truthfully, his memories of Carter aren’t great. Emotions, mostly. Jealously most of all.

“I think I. Hated her. Just a bit,” he says. First person who’d ever really seen _Steve_, other than ol’ Bucky Barnes. First person Steve’d ever really seen back.

“I know,” says Steve, and Barnes thinks a long-dead version of himself would’ve been surprised by that. Here, today, Steve just bumps their shoulders together, gently. “Things were different, then. I had it all planned out, y’know? What we’d do after the war. Go buy two nice big houses in the suburbs, me ’n’ Peg in one, you ’n’ your girl in the other, next door or across the street. Have dinner parties and a thousand kids who’d all be best friends.”

“S-sounds. Fuckin’ awful.”

Another laugh. “We’d hate it! All of us! I don’t know. I guess I thought . . . it was what I was supposed to want, you know? I figured, before . . . Never thought I’d live long enough. Or that you’d eventually find a girl to settle down with and . . .” He shrugs.

Barnes waves a hand, dismissive. “Nah. N-never. Thought like that.” He thinks it’s true. His memory’s shot for events and specifics but the emotions never really went away. And thinking of the life Steve is describing gives him nothing. “F-figured we’d just. Turn into old. Coots. Like— On the. The corner . . .”

“Jack Raz and Mark Nolan,” Steve supplies, smooth and easy, like the memory was yesterday.

“Y-yeah.” Sure. If Stevie knows who he means . . .

“Confirmed bachelors . . . though I suppose they just call it ‘gay’ nowadays.”

“That word—”

Steve laughs. “I know! God. It’s just . . . half the time I think I’ve caught up with ‘da lingedey’”—Steve wriggles his fingers in the air as he says it, voice expressing his Marianna Trench-like skepticism—”and suddenly Tony or Sam or Nat will open their mouths and it’s like I’m on another planet. Worse; at least there they might have a translator!”

Barnes huffs, not quite a laugh. “I think . . . Soldier. Would get briefings. Sometimes. For missions. I remember . . . ‘Groovy’?” Why would so many things be grooved they needed their own adjective? There’s no context there, just the word. Was Soldier once sent on a high-profile fitter-and-turner assassination?

Steve shrugs. “Don’t look at me. Haven’t heard that one recently.”

“I. Hate this. Century,” Barnes says, not for the first time.

Steve laughs again, bumps their shoulders again. “God. I’m so glad . . .” He pauses, takes a deep breath. “I mean it,” he says. Slower, this time. Serious. “About— I’d marry you. In a heartbeat. If . . . if you wanted it.”

Barnes’s cocoa is going cold. He takes a sip of it anyway, trying to work out if he likes the taste. He used to, he thinks. But . . . it wasn’t quite like this. Grittier, maybe. Less sweet. He doesn’t remember so much as _know_, so much as _feel_. That’s what his life is, now. Memories can be broken but somehow, somewhere, _something_ lives on. ’Til the end of the line.

“Sure,” his mouth says, running like a freight train through blood and frost and lightning. “Not like I got many other dames bustin’ down my door.”

Beside him, he hears Stevie suck in a breath, like he’s been gut-punched. He drops to the floor like the same, and Barnes has one moment of panic before Steve is reaching to clasp their hands and looking up with eyes that shine with joy and tears as he says:

“James Buchanan Barnes. Will you do the honor of making me the happiest man in the world? Will you marry me?”

And it’s awful and it’s cheesy and, Jesus. Barnes thinks he’s blushing for the first time in seventy goddamn years, and he wants to say something glib, to brush it off, to hide from this too-big-too-real-too-sudden _thing_ that’s he’s unleashed except when he opens his mouth the only thing that comes out is:

“Yeah. Okay.”

And then Steve is surging to his feet, big and broad and warm as he presses close, cups Barnes’s cheeks with his fingertips—not too much, not too tight or too smothering—and says:

“I’m going to kiss you now.”

He isn’t, though. Because Barnes is going to get there first.

* * *

They end up on the couch, somehow. Shirts on the floor and pants pushed down just enough their cocks jut free. Steve is _huge_, almost comically so, and shy about it too because of-damn-course he is.

“It . . . the serum,” he gasps, in between frantic kisses and the feel of Barnes’s hand, pressing them together and stroking.

“Yeah.” Barnes thinks his dead self had gone through the same thing, after Azzano. Not to the same extent. But he knows he can fuck and cum for hours and he doesn’t want to know how he knows this, fucking HYDRA, because it wasn’t anything recent, wasn’t anything that’s come back as anything but a sick churn in his gut and a feel of burning shame and—

“Buck? Buck, you with me?”

And he isn’t there. He’s here, pressing little-big Stevie Rogers into a not-so-dead man’s sofa.

He kisses Steve to shut him up. It works, only thing that ever did and, god. They shoulda been doing this decades ago. Keep Stevie outta trouble by keeping him in Bucky’s bed, head thrown back and hair damp with pleasure-sweat, hips thrusting up into Bucky’s hand, rutting against Bucky’s dick in a way that manages to at least coil some distant memory of something good in his belly.

He’d done this. In the war. Not many dames on the Front so fellas helped each other out. Didn’t mean nothin’. Not like this.

Christ, did he really just agree to marry Steve? He’s, what? Affianced? They still call it that when it’s two men?

“Buck?” Stevie is blinking up at him again, all big baby blues and swollen red lips. “We don’t . . . we don’t have to . . .” He’s blushing something furious but his hips are twitching like he can’t stop them and his big warm hands are kneading the globes of Bucky’s ass like they’re fresh-made bread dough.

“You ever done this before? With a fella?” Bucky asks, because he’s always been soft on Stevie but he’s always had a mean streak in him, too. And he knows how to change the subject, steer away from the cold dark he doesn’t want to go back to, not here or now or ever.

Steve’s blush is practically all the way down his chest, now. Tight little nipples and, Christ. Titties bigger’n half the women Buck’s been with, and ain’t that a thing?

“That, um. That obvious, huh?”

“Better make it good for you, then. Gonna be my best fella you ain’t gonna be getting anything from anybody else.”

Steve’s hands are stilled and he’s looking up, too sharp and too knowing. Bucky knows why—Ma didn’t raise no dullard, no sir—but doesn’t want to think about it, to talk about it. It’s been three lifetimes and more wars than he can count and right now all he wants is the warmth of Steve’s skin on his and the taste of Steve’s moans and the hot coil of pleasure between his thighs as he ruts their dicks through his hand again and again.

“Oh, God, Buck,” Steve says, voice raw and broken. “Please. I want— I want . . .”

“Anything, Stevie,” is the reply, will always _be_ the reply. “Anything you want, it’s yours. Pull the moon outta the goddamn sky for you, baby.”

“God,” says Steve, voice strangled and breathless, as he arches his neck back and comes.

“That’s it, baby,” Bucky whispers, fingers tightening and he chases his own pleasure down. “So pretty. Always such a pretty fella. Love watching you. Loved it then, love it now.”

“Buck! Please!” Cock spent but not softening, ready for another round.

“I know you got more in you. Probably keep you goin’ all night if I tried, right? Suck you and fuck till you don’t remember your own damn name, paint the whole house with your goddamn super soldier jizz.”

The second time, Steve sobs. Just a little. Relief, not pain. Never pain.

“Oh, Stevie,” Bucky sighs, and lets his own release crash over him like the lightning, bringing the dark of thoughtless nothing in its wake.

* * *

Steve cleans them up with a shirt, because of course he does, then pulls the throw over their legs. Barnes lets himself be manhandled, boneless and pliant, body humming with some rare current as he tries to sift through the broken-off shards inside his head to reassemble something he can use.

They lie there for a while, afterwards. Steve isn’t quite relaxed, perched on the edge of wanting to talk about what happened. Barnes does not want to talk about what happened. He wants to rub his cheek on Steve’s warm chest and not think or talk or _do_, ever again. Stick a fork in, he’s done.

He doesn’t quite sleep, but he drifts. Nothing tethering him bar the soft feel of Steve’s fingers, tracing the scars on his shoulder and the plates in his arm. Eventually, it gets too much and the arm twitches, whirring and shifting as it tries to respond to such a foreign, gentle caress.

Steve pulls his fingers away like they’re burning. “Sorry.”

“S’okay,” Barnes mutters into his chest. “Just tickles.” Not quote the right word—there aren’t quite the right words in any fleshy human language—but it’s close enough.

“I . . . didn’t know you could feel it.”

“S’my _arm_, Stevie.” Of course he can feel it. His arm, his feeling. His intent. Not HYDRA’s, not any one else’s. If he keeps repeating that, eventually it might be true.

“Buck, three days ago you reached into the oven and pulled out a casserole dish without a mitt.”

“S’a _metal_ arm, Stevie.” Then, because Steve’s always had the letting go power of a bulldog: “Pressure, temperature. Pain if the insides’re damaged.” Almost impossible through the casing, and the days of HYDRA opening it up to just listen to the Soldier scream are over.

“Oh,” says Steve. He goes back to tracing the seams, feather-light. Probably just to hear the mechanism whir in response, the little punk.

Then:

“Your star is scratched.”

“Yeah.” Knife blade, back in those first few, frantic, awful weeks.

“I could . . . fix it for you, if you like?”

“Can. Fix it right. Off. If you like.” Too much taking. The drift is wearing off. Barnes sighs and lets it go. He’s an (almost) married man, now. That means he can get more from Stevie whenever they like, right? He shifts his thighs experimentally, hears the soft hitch of Stevie’s breath. Yeah. Real soon, maybe.

“I can— can do that,” Steve says, probably about the damn star. He rubs his finger a little firmer. Testing the edges, perhaps. “Yeah. This should come off. Got some solvent in my shield bag.”

“They still. Makin’ you paint your. Own stripes, Cap?”

Steve huffs, not quite a laugh. “Not really anyone around to do it for me right now.”

Barnes frowns. They haven’t talked much about this, not really. Barnes is a war criminal and a traitor and a fugitive. Steve is . . . what, exactly? Not quite a private citizen, not quite a government employee.

“You still. Report to Fury.” Not an accusation, just an observation.

“You, uh. You remember shooting him?”

“Not really.” He knows it, in an abstract sort of sense, but the memories from those last two missions are . . . scrambled. Frozen. Even less coherent than some of the older things.

“Well, uh. He didn’t die. Just . . . faked it.”

“Okay.” Barnes clamps down on an instinct to berate Steve for saying the obvious. Maybe it’s not, any more. Hell, they’re both walking ghosts in their own right. Maybe the restless dead are common now. Like the fucking aliens.

“And I don’t . . . it’s not reporting, exactly. He’s helped us. I think . . . Insight, HYDRA . . . he took all that hard. He’s a good man. He just—” He stops himself, starts again: “That’s the problem with certainty. Things are so complicated now. How can anyone ever know from the start which paths help more than they hurt?” He trails off as he says it, voice unfocused and barely more than a whisper, and Barnes wonders who Steve thinks he’s really talking about; Fury, or himself.

* * *

* * *

They take the humvees; Sam and Barnes and Jace and half Jace’s men in one, Rumlow’s contingent in another, the third mixed. Sam spends the whole trip brooding, the image of that goddamn shield imprinted behind his eyelids.

Jace notices. Well, everyone does. Except maybe Barnes, who’s cleaned up and put his face back on and is back to sitting rigidly and staring at nothing. He’s next to Sam, close enough they’re pressed together and Sam can smell the strangely animal reek of him; sweat-musk and old blood and, now, stale vomit. It’s such a weirdly human smell to be coming from someone so . . . not. Sam had been expecting oil and ozone and frost.

“Got word in from Control just before we found you,” Jace says, not unkindly. “Crossbones’s crew tracked down Rogers to a safehouse not far from here. Blew the whole thing to shreds. Woulda been quick, if that helps.”

Sam is on Barnes’s right side. Barnes is wearing a long sleeve and glove on this arm, but the way he’s sitting there’s a gap between the two, and Sam can see a little pink bracelet around his wrist. It takes Sam a moment, but . . . it’s not a bracelet, it’s a hair tie. A pink elastic hair tie. Sam thinks of the shield and he thinks of the note; sweaty, like it’d been held against a body for a while. Five days. Barnes’s brutal dedication to method acting. And Sam just . . . he doesn’t _know_. He isn’t cut out for this spy shit. That’s Nat’s job and— God. Natasha. Where the fuck is Natasha?

“I know he was your friend,” Jace is saying. “It’s not personal.”

Sam looks up, anger curling in his gut like a goddamn safehouse explosion. “You’re right,” he says. “It’s not _personal_. It’s never fucking _personal_. It’s goddamn _treason_ is what it is, you traitorous Nazi fuck! You betray your country, you murder its citizens . . . What part of that is fucking ‘personal’ to you, huh?”

Jace scowls. “It ain’t like that.”

“How?” Sam sits up, as straight as the cuffs allow. “How isn’t it ‘like that’? You know who this fucking is?” He gestures at Barnes. “You know what they fucking did to him? And why? Put his brain through a fucking blender so some rich little white boys could get a little richer, playing little games of _Risk_ with the goddamn planet! And for what?”

“For stability,” Jace says, smooth as a recruiting poster. “For order. The world needs a strong hand to—”

“Fuck you! It’s about _power_! It’s. Always. About. Power!” Sam slams back against the humvee wall in emphasis as he says it, if only because he can’t beat in Jace’s stupid scowling face with his hands tied.

“This is a war,” Jace says, just one step shy of snapping. His eyes keep flicking to Barnes and back, like he can’t quite make himself _see._ The others are starting to look uneasy too, fingers twitching for weapons or reprimands, and not daring to do either.

“It’s not a _war_,” Sam is saying. “You ever been to war you rent-a-cop fuck? Real war?” He nudges Barnes, suddenly brave and reckless and stupid. “How many wars you been in, Barnes?”

He’s not really expecting an answer. Neither is anyone else. Meaning the whole car startles when a rasping voice grates out: “Seventeen.”

“Yeah? You wanna tell the group your mission objectives for those?”

And Barnes says:

“World War II: Defeat Axis powers, liberate invaded countries, protect and release prisoners, defeat HYDRA. Korean War: assassinate key Korean and American personnel, destabilize relations. Laotian Civil War: sabotage key American and South Vietnamese resources, prolong conflict. Lebanon, 1958: exacerbate religious tensions through strategic assassination and sabotage, encouraging revolution as pretext for invasion. Cuba, 1961: strategic assistance to prevent full coup by Brigade 2506. Vietnam War: strategic assassination and sabotage to prolong—”

“Enough!” From Jace. He’s looking at Barnes with growing horror.

“See?” Sam says. “It’s not about ‘stability’ or about ‘order’. It’s about _your_ bosses spending seventy goddamn years making the world a worse place to suit their own ends. It’s about _you_ working for an organization that’d beat and fry a man’s memories right outta his head to try and stop him from having a single goddamn independent thought about what the hell he was doing or who he was doing it for or why. And if you think they wouldn’t do the same damn thing to you, any of you, in a heartbeat, then, boys. I got a damn bridge for you to buy.”

Sam slumps back, suddenly exhausted, heart racing like he’s just run a damn marathon. “But you know what?” he says. “Fuck all that. Because you deadshit fuckers wrecked the world, and convinced yourselves it was righteous. And then you murdered Captain goddamn America for it. You murdered Steve Rogers, my goddamn friend. His”—he gestures at Barnes again—”goddamn friend. So, you know what? Yeah. Maybe it is fucking personal. And you owe us. You all owe us big. So you’d _better_ fucking hope neither of us are ever, ever in the position to come collect.”

* * *

After that, things get awkward. Jace spends the entire time with his arms crossed, scowling at his boots, while his men shift anxiously around him. Sam, after some consideration, takes a nap.

He ends up nudged awake some unknown number of hours later, face full of sweaty assassin hair and cheek creased by body armur. Apparently Barnes takes to being used as a pillow like he takes to everything—which is to say, stoically and unflinchingly—but the humvees are slowing and by the sound they’re rolling on blacktop, not dirt.

“Winter Soldier Airbnb special,” Sam mutters. His eyes are sleep-gritty but he can’t rub at them with his hands tied, because fuck this situation and everything about it. “Great beds. Real soft Kevlar. No assassination. Highly recommended.” He likes to imagine Barnes is smirking on the inside at the joke.

He likes to imagine some part of Barnes is left _to_ smirk.

The light changes in a way that, from what Sam can see through the front, means they’ve gone underground. Another goddamn secret base, then. Sam is getting kind of sick of them. Why can’t HYDRA have been into secret tropical island resorts, instead?

Hell. For all Sam knows, they are. He’ll have to ask Nat. When they get out of this alive. Which they’re totally going to do.

He tries very, very hard not to think of Steve.

He’s second-last out of the vehicle, after Jace’s men and before Barnes. Rumlow and co. are already standing around waiting for them, posing like a poorly-lit NRA ad in what turns out to be a completely normal-looking parking garage. Sam supposes even HYDRA have to put cars somewhere, and there are only so many ways to express “evil Nazi death cult” with parking bays and support pylons. There are even fire escapes and those little clearance indicator bars handing from the ceiling, because god forbid anyone sue their evil overlord for OSHA violations.

Rumlow has his helmet off—his face is kind of a mess, but he’s not unrecognizable—and makes sure to make smirking eye-contact with Sam at every opportunity, patting the shield bag as he does. At least he isn’t trying to wield it, and it occurs to Sam he might be trying to keep it hidden from Barnes; Rumlow had only pulled it out before when the latter was busy hacking up blood, and had put it away quickly soon after.

“Not gonna show Barnes your little trophy?” Sam asks, the next time Rumlow does his little fly-by. They’re out of the garage and into the sorts of spartan concrete corridors that span institutions the world over. No one’s bothered to tell Sam where they’re going or why, and he hasn’t asked. He assumes a cell is going to feature at some point (and hopefully nothing . . . more than that).

“Waiting for the right moment,” Rumlow says. He’s shooting for cocky but Sam sees the way he makes sure there’s always at least one body between him and Barnes. Not so tough when he’s not the one giving orders, Sam thinks.

“Soldier’s been in this facility before,” Rumlow continues. “Ain’t that right, champ? Real familiar with the labs downstairs. Don’t worry; we’ll get you strapped down in your chair soon enough. Might even show you my little prize before they scramble your brains up and throw you back in the tank. It just doesn’t feel like home without you pissing yourself and sobbing while you scream.”

Ahead, Sam sees Jace’s shoulders tense. A few of the others, too. Sam was right, then; they really don’t know what was done to Barnes. Just swallowed what they’ve been told about HYDRA’s “perfect Soldier”, never asking how that sausage had been made. Even some of Rumlow’s own look uneasy.

“Shut the hell up,” Jace says, reading the room. “You’re here to run an errand, nothing more.”

“Sure, buddy. You keep telling yourself that.”

Sam laughs. “You think HYDRA’s gonna take you back,” he realizes. “Second you thought they were losing you jump ship, but _now_ you think you’re gonna waltz back in here, dump Cap’s shield on the floor and, what? You’ll get a pat on the head and a gold sticker on your chart?” He turns to Barnes. “Can you believe this guy?”

Barnes neither confirms nor denies his belief in Rumlow—apparently his earlier talkative mood has faded—but Rumlow picks up the implication all the same. So do Jace and the others who’d been in the vehicle.

“Big talk from a man in chains,” Rumlow says. “What do _you_ think you’re here for, exactly?”

Honestly, this is yet another thing Sam has been trying not to think about. Barnes had called him _collateral_ so he’d been assuming some kind of ransom or bargaining chip. Until that damn note. And now . . . what exactly?

They’ve wandered into a more operational looking corridor—more HYDRA logos and less exposed piping—and, up ahead, a large set of double glass doors swish open as they approach. Inside, is the sort of control room Sam usually associates with Bond films; all matte black panelling with HYDRA-red holos projecting maps of the world and camera feeds and god only knows what else. The room is mostly empty apart from what Sam can’t help but think of as the captain’s chair, turned forward and away from them but obviously occupied.

Jace comes to a stop behind it and stands at attention, and looks like he’s about to announce their arrival when Rumlow beats him to it.

“Alpha STRIKE reporting complete success, sir,” he says, asshole voice dialed to maximum. “All packages retrieved and delivered.”

And then a very, very familiar voice says:

“Well. Guess you’re good for something after all, Brock.”

And the chair spins around and Steve goddamn Rogers fixes them all with his most shit-eating grin.

* * *

* * *

It takes nearly a month for the Soldier to make it through a full day of new training without malfunction. It is . . . a strange feeling. Physically and mentally grueling but . . . validating, too. And not just for the way the Captain smiles and says, “Aa-aa-and, that’s time. Good work, Soldier. You’ve done amazingly well.”

He helps the Soldier off the mats, propping the asset up when it stumbles and holding it close despite the rank sweat that soaks its skin.

“It should get easier,” the Captain says, as he helps Soldier to sit on the padding of the bench press. “It’s already _gotten_ easier, right?”

The Soldier nods. Not just because it’s expected—because it isn’t, the Captain preferring honestly to acquiescence—but because it’s true. The programming is not easy, but it has gotten easier. It may never be truly easy but the Captain hopes this won’t be required. _“It just needs to be reliable,”_ he’d told the Soldier, weeks ago now. _“And manageable, for you.”_

The Captain has a strange, almost insulting, understanding of what is “manageable” to the Soldier, perhaps because of his fondness for the asset and his reluctance to see it harmed or discomforted, even in the most minor ways. It is unusual, for a handler, though has proven intensely beneficial to the Soldier’s operational effectiveness. Besides. It is . . . appealing. Not to be in pain.

(The Soldier does not judge appeal. The Soldier does not flinch from pain. The Soldier does_ shut the hell up and drink its water, is what the Soldier does_.)

The Soldier shuts the hell up, and drinks its water.

After the asset is recovered and the Captain has tidied, they shower. This is new, showering together, after an incident a week ago where the asset collapsed from exhaustion and malfunctioned and the Captain found it on the floor of the shower after the water had run cold. The Captain had been extremely upset by this situation though, in his usual way, redressed the issue not with punishment but rather reward. Sometimes, like today, when the Soldier is very tired the Captain will even prop the asset up and wash it himself, which is extremely . . . operationally efficient.

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you enjoyed this,” the Captain says, smirking. He’s massaging shampoo into the asset’s scalp with excessive diligence, the action reducing cranial tension in and increasing operational function of the asset.

“The Soldier does not enjoy,” the Soldier says, because it makes the Captain laugh and pleasing handlers is good.

“Yeah, and the Soldier does not make sassy backtalk while getting a massage, either, I hear.”

“Confirmed.”

The earns the Soldier a kiss in return, chaste and brief.

Showers are different but shutdown remains the same. They’ve practiced the override hand-over several times but it remains . . . problematic. The Captain believes the issues are psychological and argues about this, at length, with the malfunction which in turn tells him to _get fucked_ and _go to hell, Stevie_, neither of which are operationally useful responses but, of course, that is why the malfunction is a malfunction. Either way, the Soldier settles the asset into the chair and waits, calm and patient, as the Captain utters the trigger—

“Can I have Bucky back, please?”

—and it’s still like crashing through ice and bring slammed by lightning, all at once, every muscle from crown to toe tensing in rebellion. It will never be easy, maybe, but it is easier and the sensations are less like pain and more like the memory of it from a dream. They fade fast, now, and when Barnes opens his eyes he’s in that same damn chair staring at that same damn ceiling, about to answer that same damn question.

“How’re you feeling?”

“F-fuck you. Stevie.”

Steve laughs, honestly pleased, and he pats Barnes’s knee as he moves to stand. “I’m gonna go make dinner,” he says. “You wanna finds us something on the Netflix?”

“No.”

“You wanna sit there in the dark and stare at nothing for a while?”

“Thinkin’. ‘Bout it.”

This earns him a kiss. Steve goes for the temple but Barnes didn’t spend all day deep in churning dark for that shit, and turns his face at the last minute, grabbing Stevie by the neck to bring him in for something good and real.

It doesn’t lead to anything; Barnes really is exhausted, more mentally than physically but it’s been startling to realize (re-learn?) just how much the fear and stress can take its toll. Less fear now, here, with Steve, but . . . never none. Maybe never none ever again, a part of Barnes that will never come back from being that beaten, broken thing, shivering in the corner in the dark. He’s hated that thing, its weakness and betrayal, with every moment of coherent thought he’s had these long, cold decades but . . . but maybe he doesn’t have to, not any more. Doesn’t need to keep it caged and hunted so much as calmed and quiet. Like Stevie with the Soldier; tamed and curbed with praise and care and a speed and finality HYDRA could only ever dream of.

Barnes had been afraid, the first time Steve had wanted to share a bed, too sprawled and sated and sex-heavy to return to his own. _“It’ll be fine,”_ he’d said. _“You won’t kill me in your sleep.”_

_“If it activates—”_

“_He won’t. He never has, right? I don’t think things work that way.”_

Soldier doesn’t sleep; had the urge beaten and burned and fried out decades ago. Steve thinks it’s because what he calls the “psycho-suggestive hypnotic state” can’t be maintained through unconsciousness, same as Soldier tends to malfunction if knocked out. Barnes had been reluctant to bet Steve’s life on it.

Eight nights, they got through. Until finally exhaustion had caught up, followed by a nightmare Pierce-Zola-Karpov and the Chair and a kill order and those goddamn words and the Soldier snapping awake in Barnes’s bed, taking one look at a Steve’s ugly mug smushed into the pillow and thinking, _Oh, a dream. _Then lying there, still and awake, waiting for real orders until morning.

(Steve had been fascinated to learn Barnes had apparently triggered himself in his sleep, mostly because it doesn’t work while he’s awake; Barnes can chant in pitch-perfect Russian sunup to sundown and the only thing it’ll do is turn his voice to sandpaper. Meanwhile, Soldier now has a standing order to, if it happens again, either go back to sleep or wake Steve up to help. Because fuck the both of them, essentially.)

Steve is in the kitchen, frying something when Barnes finally manages to drag himself from the chair. He slumps against Steve’s broad, warm back, nuzzling between the shoulder blades and remembering what it used to be like when he could count every single vertebra through paper-thin skin. Sometimes, Barnes thinks this Captain American is just gonna fold open like Iron Man and his old Steve will step out. That’s probably a horrible, selfish thing to think but, well. Barnes stopped believing he was good about the time they took his arm and broke his mind.

“Try this.” Steve half turns, holding up an oversized cooking spoon with a piece of stir-fry broccoli on the end. Barnes obligingly eats it, because it’s Steve who’s offering.

“Well?”

“Hot,” Barnes says. “Crunchy. Salty.”

“Good?”

“Food.” Steve is trying to expose him to different foods, trying to find something he can process as pleasure rather than simply flavored nutrition chunks. It isn’t working, but Steve seems to enjoy the effort.

The end result is served on noodles and they eat it out of bowls, sitting on the couch watching a drama about Britain’s new queen. Barnes wonders whether it makes Steve think of Peggy though, if it does, it doesn’t stop Steve from holding Barnes close and running gentle fingers through his hair. Barnes, not particularly interested in either monarchy (he’s killed too much royalty for that) or limey dames, dozes.

After, Steve nudges him awake and they brush their teeth together, side-by-side, in the en suite. It’s probably bigger than the entire apartment Steve used to share with a dead man a lifetime ago. Significantly more stone benches, too; everything ludicrously lush and expensive-seeming, even though Barnes knows the finishes are fairly normal for modern homes. Soldier’s spent a lot of time in places more luxurious again, but usually either for the purpose of murder or staring blankly while being pontificated to or at or around about the righteousness of said murder, so had mostly spent the time screaming internally, not admiring the decor.

Because Steve is Steve, he’d assigned Barnes the master bedroom from the outset. Now, they fall into the ridiculously enormous bed, stealing mint-flavored kisses as they rut, naked and sleepy, against each other.

It’s Steve who slides down first, pushing Barnes onto his back and wrapping warm lips around his flushed cock. Barnes sighs and threads flesh fingers through golden hair, eyes closed and back arched and thinking very carefully of nothing at all. After he comes, he returns the favor, unhurried, spit-slick metal finger up Stevie’s ass to find the spot that makes him squirm. Three days ago Barnes discovered that, if he flexes his arm in a specific way, the whirring insides vibrate enough to make Stevie whimper like a good-time girl. This is almost certainly not what HYDRA ever intended their weapon to be used for, meaning Barnes has vowed to do it as often as possible. So far, Steve has not chosen to complain.

They fool around until they stop, content, and Steve cleans up and turns off the light. Then they lie there in the dark, curled around each other like cats, and it’s as close to peace as Barnes can remember.

“I think we should have lilies,” Steve says. “At the wedding. Your ma loved lilies.”

Lilies are for death, Barnes thinks, and maybe that’s fitting. So: “Sure, Stevie. Whatever you want.”

“Yup. Definitely lilies.” Barnes doesn’t need to see Steve’s face to know the shit-eating grin he’s projecting into the dark. “Big bunches of them. Red, white, and blue. And eagle feathers in every bouquet, for extra patriotism.”

Barnes just rolls him over in the dark, and shuts him up the only way he knows how.

* * *

The next day is rest day, so Steve goes into town for groceries. Barnes stays behind and takes a jog instead; his head’s still half-scrambled from the reprogramming and he doesn’t want to deal with other people on top of everything else. So he kisses Steve goodbye at the door and they set off their different ways.

Jogging is . . . fine. Not an activity Barnes either enjoys or dislikes, though his body’s built for it now and he can probably keep up his current pace for days. Mostly, it’s just mindless. Steve has one of those little modern music players Stark’s kid makes, and Barnes pops in the tiny headphones and sets the collection to random. He’s not as dedicated to catching up on a lifetime of pop culture as Steve is, but he thinks he’s always enjoyed music and plenty of the loud, strange modern tunes have beats fit to run to. It’s not dancing but it’s close, and it chews up time and clears the static, and that’s good enough.

It’s about an hour and a half before the headphones start complaining about batteries—Steve is absolutely abysmal at charging his stuff—and Barnes heads back. The sun is bright and warm but the air is crisp enough to keep the heat at bay and it suddenly occurs to Barnes, jogging the now-well-worn trails around the safehouse, that it’s a legitimately beautiful day.

It’s a beautiful day, he has nowhere to be, no one to kill, and the love of his life to come home to. The thought stops him dead, and for a while he feels crushed by the _enormity_ of it all. That he has this; after everything he’s done and was done to him, that he will yet do. He has this. Because of . . . why? One chance meeting, one rash decision, made by a ghost. Because once upon a time Bucky Barnes had helped a skinny little scrap of a thing and has been paying for it, has been paid for it, ever since.

_’Til the end of the line,_ Steve had said, half-promise half-threat; an unstoppable force hurtling through Bucky’s life like a train through the alps and a bullet down a barrel. And, maybe, who is Barnes to try and stop that? He ran five thousand miles in pain and guilt and fear and horror, Steve dogging his steps at every turn, not to hunt a monster but to bring it home and soothe its hurts.

Bucky decides to stop running. When Steve gets back he’ll . . . he isn’t sure. Go wherever Steve wants to go, do whatever Steve wants to do, whether that’s staying here and growing old or it’s returning to the States to fight the future piece-by-chrome-edged piece. Bucky will do it. Because how else could things ever have gone? The Soldier may have shaped the century but Steve had shaped the Soldier first. Now, it’s time to return home.

Figuratively and literally, in fact, and when Bucky gets back to the safehouse, the door is ajar. He exhales in frustration, calling out, “Your ma raise you in a barn while I wasn’t looking?” as he closes it behind him.

There’s movement in the kitchen and Bucky heads towards it, but when he gets there it isn’t Steve unpacking groceries.

It’s a man. He has a gun and a HYDRA-issue taser and he uses the second with impunity. Bucky goes down hard on the kitchen tiles, arm grinding offline and falling limp. He’s cursing it and cursing himself—stupid, inattentive, getting too comfortable and too soft and too distracted—when the man switches from the taser to the gun and says:

“No. Stay on the floor, where you belong.” Then begins to speak in Russian.

Bucky screams, or tries to, as the bottom drops out of his mind and he plummets into the dark. _Rusted_, the man says, and Bucky thinks, _End of the line. End of the line. Endofthelineendofthelineendoftheline_, screaming it into his head as his limbs seize up and his body convulses. He grasps the phrase like a drowning man with a rope; that one rough, frayed cord the only thing keeping his head above the black and frozen tide.

_Homecoming_, the man says, and the Soldier opens the asset’s eyes, unclenches muscles limb by agonizing limb. When it stands, it stares at a stranger down the barrel of a gun.

_End of the line,_ the malfunction screams, one last time, then goes silent.

“Acknowledged,” says the Soldier. “Ready to comply.”

The stranger smiles, and lowers the gun. “Oh, yes,” he says, smile bursting forth like rotting fruit. “This will do just nicely.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Believe it or not, this is the _nice_ version of the cliffhanger chapter breaks; in the original plan they were much meaner, but the scene lengths didn't quite work out. So... this.
> 
> _We're gonna have a [problem here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3aGk_Gwqjw)..._


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warnings** for assholes being racist and homophobic, some (mostly off-screen) torture... and totally ridiculous and biologically dubious supersoldier sex!

“The fuck is this shit?”

Apparently Rumlow is as in on the joke as Sam is, albeit more vocally so. Sam, for his part, is currently vacillating between _numb_ and _disbelief_.

Steve, on the other hand, just stands and rolls his eyes. “Control didn’t fill you in?”

“I—” Rumlow stops short, jaw working. Eventually, he grinds out, “We were told our contact would be Nomad.”

Steve winces, big and exaggerated. “One day they’ll let me pick my own code names.”

“There was— there was a body!”

“Yup,” says Steve. “And I assume if you know that, you went digging through the rubble enough to bring me back what’s mine.”

Rumlow actually takes a step back at that, hand tightening on the strap of his bag. “Fuck you. I want to speak to Control, now!” His men start looking uneasy, which infects Jace’s men in turn. Somehow, Sam can’t even be surprised that communication apparently isn’t HYDRA’s strong suit.

Steve just gives his most pronounced Captain America Is Disappointed In You Son expression, and says:

“Soldier. If you wouldn’t mind . . .?”

Soldier apparently would not—still bitter about the cattle prod, maybe—and in the next moment Rumlow is on his back on the ground, rolling around like a goddamn beetle. Whatever his armor does, it apparently doesn’t make him fast, or able to see Barnes coming when he aims a blank-faced leg sweep Rumlow’s way.

The incident leads to a lot of humiliated spluttering as Rumlow’s men pick him up off the floor, while Barnes hands the liberated bag over to Steve.

“Thank you, Soldier,” says Steve, apparently sincerely. He even smiles at Barnes and squeezes the guy on the metal bicep, like they really are just old pals doing each other a solid. Barnes’s expression doesn’t so much as twitch, but he does reposition himself so he’s a little closer to Steve, while still being in reach of Sam.

Steve, meanwhile, is unzipping the bag and pulling out his shield. He makes a hurt little sound when he sees it, then turns to display the defaced front to Rumlow. “Really?” He has such a comically outraged expression it would be funny, if not for everything else. “You know I went to art school, right?” As of the crudity of execution is the only thing wrong with having HYDRA’s skull-faced kraken slapped all over Captain America’s shield.

“Fuck you, Rogers,” is Rumlow’s eloquent reply. It’s impossible to tell under the scarring, but Sam would almost think the guy is _blushing_.

“Language!” Steve says, dripping so much sincerity he must be faking it. He hands the shield to Barnes, who takes it uncomplainingly and holds it like he’s done so a thousand times which, for all Sam knows, he might’ve. No one in the room fails to notice.

“And the rest?” Steve is saying.

“Not a chance,” Rumlow growls. “I’m not buying any of this shit. Not you, not that . . .” A dismissive nod at Barnes that sets Steve scowling. “I demand to talk to Control.”

“Son, I’m sure Agent Fowler has already explained this to you, but let me make it extra clear: you quit. If you want your old job back, take it up with Control when he gets here. In the meantime, you’re nothing but the hired help. You don’t get to make demands, or give orders, or ask questions, and nothing at all hinges on you ‘buying’”—Steve makes air quotes, the grandpa—”anything. You do your job, you get paid, and you leave. Simple enough, even for you. Yet, somehow, you’re failing at it. Frankly, by this stage, I’m just disappointed.”

There’s such a back-scatter on that one that Rumlow’s entire team looks ashamed, even if the man in question barrels blithely through. “Control is coming here?”

“ETA two hours,” Steve says. “So if you want to make a scene, you’d better go put on your big boy pants to prepare. In the meantime, you’re all dismissed.”

“Sir, yes sir!” says Agent Jace-possibly-Fowler, snapping off HYDRA’s excuse for a salute. He and his men begin to disperse, though not without rounds of glares at Rumlow’s people.

Steve goes about the motions of deliberately ignoring them, mostly by retrieving his shield from Barnes and inspecting the damage. “Think I’m going to have to have to clean the whole thing off and start from scratch,” he murmurs, either to himself or to Barnes or both. Barnes makes no reply, being as he’s too busy death-glaring at Rumlow over Steve’s shoulder. Sam thinks it’s the first time he’s seen Barnes make direct eye contact with someone and, honestly, if Rumlow isn’t terrified, he should be.

Steve notices Barnes’s attention, though he doesn’t turn. “What is it, Brock?”

Rumlow nods towards Sam. “What’re you doing with that?”

Rumlow sent his men out at the same time as Jace’s, so it’s just the four of them in the control room. Which might be why Steve actually has the gall to _look at Sam and roll his eyes_, before turning back to Rumlow to say: “What did we just talk about?”

“You think I’m leaving you alone with Wilson you’re even dumber than your posters. You don’t like it, take it up with Control.”

Steve just sighs. “Soldier, please show Sam to his cell. Brock can supervise if he has to.” Then, to Rumlow: “If you so much as breath too hard on the prisoner, Soldier will tear off _your_ arm. Clear?”

“Crystal.”

Sam didn’t think it was physically possible to project an ever danker air of brooding surliness than Barnes does, but somehow Rumlow manages it. Sam waits until Steve is (probably) out of earshot before letting out a whistling breath and announcing:

“Well. See they didn’t bother letting you in the plot either.”

“Shut the hell up, Wilson.”

“Just sayin’, man. Was not expecting to run into Steve in a place like this. Especially after your big ups about the shield.”

“I said—”

“Guess they made you their fall guy, huh? Someone contacts you with a hit on Cap, knowing you’d jump at the chance. But because you’re on the shitlist, they don’t bother letting you know none of it’s real. You’re just there to be the cover while Steve disappears into this new side hustle.” Which is . . . what, exactly? Sam does not actually believe Steve is here to rebrand himself as a HYDRA field commander. Not even for Barnes’s sake. Infiltration is his next best guess, but . . . for what purpose? Barnes is, again, the obvious answer except for the fact that, a) it’s _also_ pretty obvious that, whatever Steve’s doing, Barnes is in on it, and b) the murderbot Soldier shtick really isn’t an act. Meaning, what, exactly? The Winter Soldier finally managed to defect for real? All on itslethal little lonesome?

Or, alternate explanation: Steve figured out how to control it.

“Big talk, for someone in shackles,” Rumlow is saying.

“Maybe I just wanna watch Barnes actually rip off your arm.” He doesn’t. Probably. Also, he is totally just imagining the sound of Barnes’s own arm, whirring in interest at the suggestion. Anything else would be . . . not okay.

“What do you think you’re here for, anyway? Been trying to figure it out. Why didn’t the deep-fried wonder just put a bullet in your brain to start with. Talked it over with some of Fowler’s boys. They’d thought you were gonna be used as a bargaining chip to lure in Cap, ‘cept it looks like that’s out. So . . . what, exactly?”

Sam shrugs. “If you figure it out, you let me know, yeah?”

“See, what I’m thinking . . . Big changes are big opportunities, you know? Lotta interesting lab work being done is suddenly short of test subjects, last I heard. Gene splicing’s the hot new research. Y’know. Take a man, mix in a little monkey or mule. Bam. Brave new world.”

_Breathe in, _Sam thinks. _Breathe out. _Rumlow’s an asshole, and it’s nothing Sam hasn’t heard before.

“Now, Sergeant Slush-brain, here? Was always a rumour he’d been a test subject back in the early days. Was for everything else, right? Why not this? Story went they’d spliced him with dog genes. Something big and dumb to keep him loyal. Knew a tech who swore blind lil’ Jimmy’s dick knotted up when he popped one, y’know?” Rumlow mimes obscenely as he says it. “Always used to think he was crazy but, now? I dunno. Kinda makes sense, doesn’t it? What with Cap flipping sides’n all. I mean, you’ve seen pics of him before the serum, right? Once a pansy little faggot, always a pansy little faggot. Bet he’s fucking panting now he gets to ride himself some big thick dog dick whenever he can.” Rumlow grins, vicious and mean, pleased with himself in the way of petty, bullying assholes everywhere.

“Wow,” is what Sam says, because what else _can_ he say? To something like that. Jesus. “You wanna say something shitty ‘bout Director Carter while you’re at it? I mean, just to throw in for the full Asshole Bigot Royal Flush.” If this were a horror film, the audience would definitely be cheering when Rumlow died. It would be considered cosmic justice. Sam, well-aware of his own likelihood of survival vis-a-vis horror movie tropes, has never really wished to be in one before now, but . . . he’s starting to see the appeal.

So it’s an actual relief when they get to the cell block. Or . . . cell corridor, really. Sam isn’t that well-acquainted with detention (and all of the experiences he does have have been Steve-related, at that) but as far as he can tell, this facility isn’t even that ominous. Just three cells, bars, those gross metal toilet-sink things. No manacles or rusted gurneys or mysterious implements. Practically civilised.

He walks into the cell when Barnes opens it—with a boring, normal, metal key—and is trying to think of something witty to say that will convey his appropriate level of _what the actual fuck, Steve?_ back to the man in question without blowing anyone’s cover when Rumlow jabs something into Barnes’s neck.

There’s the briefest crackle and a smell like charred flesh, and Barnes just drops. Sam has half a second to lurch forward with a shout before Rumlow is slamming the cell door in his face, grinning like a racist Disney hyena all the while. Sam catches one glimpse of the thing in his hand—teeth like a taser but a nozzle like a jet injector, so . . . an electrified hypodermic?—before it’s vanished back into a pocket and Rumlow is hauling Barnes off the ground. Barnes isn’t quite unconscious but he doesn’t look happy, and makes a few abortive swipes that Rumlow bats aside with ease.

“Seventy years, and you’d think this sad sack of shit would learn,” he says. “But no-oo-oo.”

“Put him down you sick motherfucker!” Sam rattles the cell door as he says it, but it’s locked, and Rumlow just laughs.

“Thanks for the assist, Wilson,” he says, walking away, waving with his free hand. “I’ll let Control know you were a real big help. Maybe they’ll let you have one last proper meal before they start making you drink your own piss to stay alive.”

“Steve is going to fucking kill you!” It’s kind of a shitty threat and Rumlow knows it, laughing as he hauls Barnes out of sight.

Sam spends the next few minutes screaming and rattling his cell door and generally making as much noise as he can. _Someone_ has to be watching, surely, he can see the goddamn cameras! Steve or Jace or Random HYDRA Mook 358. Anyone. Whatever Rumlow thinks he’s up to, it doesn’t even seem to be HYDRA-approved, which is _really_ saying something, meaning surely someone must have noticed.

No one comes.

Eventually, Sam’s head clears enough to recognize he’s doing nothing but straining his throat, and he needs to rethink his strategy. So. Step one: cuffs off.

The cuffs have not suddenly magicked themselves into being any more real over the course of the day, and Sam is free in under a minute. He’s still locked in the cell itself, of course, and he takes another minute to regret he never caught onto the recreational lockpocking craze that went through his old unit when he notices there’s a _goddamn human-sized air vent_ above the toilet.

_Who the fuck puts an air vent in a prison cell?_ Sam does not ask, because Mom didn’t raise no fool and, also, he can still see some of the concrete dust from where the hole has been very obviously recently cut.

The vent is covered by a grille, but the screws are on the outside and designed for a flathead screwdriver. Sam, of course, does not have a flathead screwdriver . . . but he does have the handcuffs, whose opened ratchet mechanism is suspiciously well-suited to fitting in the slot.

The resulting work is definitely awkward, and Sam gets through one and a half of the four before the screaming starts. Muffled, but close enough; wherever Rumlow’s taken Barnes, Sam would be betting it’s in the same wing of whatever the hell this place is.

After that, he works faster.

The screams have mostly died down by the time he gets the final screw free, which is somehow worse than if they’d still been going. Sam pulls out the vent grille and tosses it on the ground, then it’s one quick pull-up from the sink into a dusty crawlspace filled with wiring conduits and cockroach corpses.

He needs to find Steve. Or a gun. Or both. So he crawls through the dust and over dubiously exposed wires in what he thinks is the general direction of the control room. It takes him away from the sound of Barnes’s screams and that’s hard, it really is—Jesus his entire career is running _towards_ the screaming, not away—but he’s not going to do either of them any favours trying to go up against Rumlow unarmed and unprepared. So he prays for forgiveness and prays Barnes can hold out as he kicks out a ceiling tile and drops into a room full of lockers.

They’re mostly unlocked, which doesn’t surprise him; HYDRA is apparently about as worried about gun safety as it is theft in its secret bunker, and Sam’s liberated two M11s and is trying to decide between an IFAK and MPX when he hears, “Eddie, that you?” and Jace freakin’ Fowler barges into the room.

There is . . . a moment. Sam stares at Jace and Jace stares back and then Sam thinks, _Fuckit_, grabs the IFAK, throws the MPX to Jace and barks:

“With me, Agent. Rumlow’s done something to the Soldier.”

And Sam can _see_ it; the moment Jace weighs up _caught prisoner escaping _and _fucking Rumlow_ and _I don’t get paid enough for this _and _who the fuck even knows what’s going on anyway_, ends up with a 3:1 ratio and decides to just fucking go with it.

Sam storms out of the room like he expects Jace to follow, which has exactly the desired effect. They get maybe two steps before Panic comes slumping around the corner, half a doughnut stuffed in his mouth and halfway through a, “‘Sup, chief? You—” then freezes.

Jace, thankfully, is on it: “Crossbones’ve fucked us. Get them on goddamn lockdown ASAP then send everyone extra to—” He glances at Sam, who supplies:

“Cell block.”

“—to D-wing. Now!”

“Siryessir!” snaps Panic-possibly-Eddie. He doesn’t even look sideways at Sam when he does; just scarfs down the rest of his snack and scrambles. Jace’s team is loyal, Sam supposes he can give them that. He’ll think about the rest of it later.

After that, they hustle. Sam has no idea where they’re going—the base is a maze and the ground layout is significantly different than the crawlspace—but he follows Jace and the trust is rewarded when they re-emerge in the corridor outside the cells. If Jace notices the one with the locked door and the vent grille on the floor, he tactfully doesn’t mention it.

“Did you see where—?”

“No. Close, though. I heard—” He cuts himself off, and Jace winces. They’re silent for a moment, but no further screaming emerges to guide them.

Jace says: “I think— there’s a room. Below us. Like the ones they kept the Soldier in, before. Don’t have access, but saw it last time I was deployed here, in ’08.”

“Alright,” Sam says. “Let’s go.”

They go.

Two corridors and half a flight of stairs later, Sam sees what Jace means; a huge, heavy vault door, or the remains of it. It currently looks like it’s been half-blown, half-torn out of its jamb. Beyond, Sam can just about make out stark white tiles and what looks like the crumpled remains of some kind of chair. Somehow, he doubts the damage was Rumlow’s.

Speaking of which; he’s definitely in the room. Sam can hear him, moving about and talking, not quite loud enough to make out. No way to know if he’s alone.

Sam starts to signal for Jace to follow but Jace shakes his head, countering that he’ll go first. Sam scowls in protest but Jace points to himself and mouths first _HYDRA_ then _distraction_. He probably has a point; of the two of them, Rumlow will definitely shoot Sam but might at least try and convert Jace to the cause. It’s risky either way, and Sam doesn’t like it. Then wonders why he’s so goddamn worried about HYDRA assholes shooting each other, realises that he actually is, damnit—if only on a general principle that he doesn’t like _anyone_ shooting each other—and is about to protest when Jace makes his decision for him and charges ahead. Sam has just enough time to mouth “Shit!” under his breath, and by the time he’s pressed his back against the edge of the ruined door, Jace is already bursting through it with a: “The hell is going on in here?”

“Stand down, Agent. Standard protocol.” Sam can’t even _see_ Rumlow and he still knows the asshole is smirking that vicious little smirk.

“The fuck it is! That’s a goddamn HYDRA agent you’re—”

“Property,” Rumlow corrects. “The Asset is HYDRA’s property. And it’s been tampered with.” Which is how it’s going to go. Not unsurprising, Sam supposes.

“What . . . do you mean?”

“Rogers and Wilson. You know they sabotaged Insight and destroyed S.H.I.E.L.D., and we have reliable intel this is their latest move against us. We don’t know exactly how, but Rogers got his hands on the Asset and has been working to reprogram it. This room had the kit to do so. The fact he’s destroyed it? Yeah, reckon that means he’s succeeded.”

“Why? Why would he—?”

“Rogers is a fossil. Stuck in the past. HYDRA made some . . . mistakes in the war, you know that. So did everyone. But Rogers, he’ll never be able to let that go, and he’ll never be able to understand the sacrifice James made for his country.”

“There . . . was a rumor,” Jace says, slow and careful. “About Soldier . . .”

“That it was originally Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes of the Howling Commandos, yeah. He was always one of us; a true patriot. Volunteered for the Winter Soldier program in the war. After his death, his body was recovered and . . . The result.”

“Why?”

“Nowadays, robots are steel and silicon, but you gotta understand things were different back then. A ‘robot’ was flesh and blood. Not mindless but certainly not a person. The program . . . it was a total fuckup. The Asset was the only unit produced. It was never decommissioned because it was useful on high-risk missions too lethal for STRIKE personnel, but honestly? It was expensive and difficult to manage. No substitute for a trained team.”

Funny. Because Jace had been gambling that Rumlow would try to convert him to the cause. It hadn’t occurred to Sam that it might _work_.

“And . . . this?”

Except . . . Jace is moving, judging from his voice. He’s moving and he’s getting Rumlow to move in turn, words both getting louder while taking on the slightly muffled edge that Sam hopes means he’s both getting closer and facing away.

“I know how it looks,” Rumlow says. “But, like I said. It isn’t a person, just a body. Do you get squeamish over a car with its hood up or a disassembled rifle?”

“He looks . . . hurt.”

“A reflex, that’s all. Muscle memory. The body reacts but there’s nothing—”

And . . . _there_. The squeak of a boot, close enough; it has to be. Sam lunges up and in and, yes! Jace has done his job and it’s simple for Sam to bring the muzzle of his pistol against the back of Rumlow’s head.

“Hands the fuck up!” he barks. “Now!”

“Oh. Wilson—”

“I said _now_!”

The room is . . . well stocked, or was, before it got hit by Hurricane Rogers. Medical equipment, most of it ancient and ugly and cruel. On the far side of the room, beyond the strange and shattered chair and an equally destroyed cryo tank, is Barnes. He’s shackled to the wall, arms spread and raised and fastened by the sort of heavy duty cuffs Sam’s only started seeing in the last few years. He’s shirtless, burned and bleeding, head hanging and face obscured by his hair. From the gasping wheeze of his breath, he’s conscious, wounds dripping into a rusty drain positioned right under his feet for exactly that purpose. None of the injuries are surgical, just cruel. Sam feels sick just thinking about them.

“Oh your knees!” he barks, as Rumlow slowly raises his hands. “Slowly! You so much as twitch and I—”

Which is exactly when two of Jace’s idiot team burst through the door. They draw what, in retrospect, is probably the obvious conclusion.

The next few few seconds invoke a lot of shouting, mostly from Jace. But Rumlow doesn’t waste time with words, and Sam finds himself thrown across the room with all the speed and strength cut-rate power armor can provide. Hitting the wall winds him, and he’s still blinking back stars when the light overhead is thrown into the shadow of Sam’s own goddamn gun, held in Rumlow’s clammy hand.

“Nice try, Wil—” is exactly as far as he gets. Is exactly the moment Barnes gives the most awful, bowel-vacating howl and wrenches the chain holding his left arm right out of the goddamn wall. Sam only knows this because Barnes swings it, iron bolts and chunk of concrete still attached, straight at Rumlow like a gladiator, catching him in the middle and reeling him in with a terrifying skill for such an awkward, improvised weapon.

Barnes’s right hand is still chained but that doesn’t stop him lunging at Rumlow, or stop him using his one free arm to tear the armor off Rumlow’s body like it’s tissue paper, howling incoherent rage the entire time. Rumlow seems too stunned to even react. So does everyone else.

_“If you so much as breath too hard on the prisoner, Soldier will tear off _your_ arm,”_ Steve had said, and the armor is gone and it suddenly occurs to Sam Barnes will do it.

“Stop!” He staggers to his feet, lurching forward. “Barnes, stop! Don’t do this! Barnes!” Then: “_Soldier_! Soldier, stop!”

And Barnes . . . stops, metal fist curled over Rumlow’s bicep.

Barnes is hunched over and feral, chest heaving, still-chained arm looking agonizingly dislocated with the angle he needs to get to Rumlow. His hair is hanging over his face, lank with pain-sweat, but one dead winter eye peers through the strands, focused somewhere just past Sam’s shoulder.

“You don’t have to do this.” Sam holds his hands out, placating, and takes a step forward. “I know he hurt you, but you’re better than him. I know you are.” This . . . is maybe only half of a lie. But Sam knows Steve thinks this, so . . . it’ll have to do.

“He’s beat, man,” Sam continues. “He doesn’t need any more. We’ll cuff him, get you free and patched up, then we’ll all go find Steve, okay?” Oh, they’ll be going to find Steve all right. Sam will be . . . so goddamn doing that.

Barnes gives one awful, shuddering breath, then another. Then his whole body does . . . something. Some kind of twitching, semi-seizure. Then his fingers uncurl from Rumlow’s arm, and he takes a jerking half-step back.

And Rumlow, who just _can’t fucking quit_, wheezes:

“Good dog, do what master—”

Barnes punches him in the gut.

Rumlow folds over, gulping and gasping for air. But he doesn’t cough blood and he doesn’t have a fist-sized hole in his stomach, so that’s something.

“Shut the hell up,” Barnes says, sounding more coherently human than anything previous. He slumps back against the wall, arm still twisted awkwardly and eyes falling closed.

They open again as Sam approaches; wary, but not hostile.

“Know how to get outta there, big guy?”

“Key,” Barnes rasps, jerking his head to where Jace and his men are doing a bang-up job of zip-tying the shit outta the still-wheezing Rumlow.

“Here,” says Jace, who’s apparently both listening and already on it. He tosses Sam something that looks sort like a Fichet lever-lock by way of a USB thumb drive, and Barnes just stands passively while Sam unlocks the cuff from around his metal wrist.

The right side is a bit trickier. Sam ends up getting one of Jace’s guys to help, because on closer inspection the shoulder is definitely wrenched out of its socket and uncuffing the whole arm and letting it drop will do more damage (not to mention hurt like a motherfucker). Sam’s trying to work out how best to get it back in position when Barnes solves the problem for him, by throwing himself abruptly and bodily against the wall. Jace’s dude screams a little as he jumps back at the movement, and Sam winces. Barnes doesn’t even blink, just stands up straight and begins to walk towards the door.

“Whoa whoa whoa.” Sam darts in front of him, and gets a not-quite-staredown in return. “You’re bleeding,” he points out.

“The asset is functional,” Barnes growls, like talking’s the thing that’s physically paining him, not the burns and bruises and lacerations. “Severity-1 mission parameter impact requires immediate report.” He doesn’t quite physically push Sam out of the way, but certainly takes a step closer to the door Sam is blocking.

Behind him, Rumlow gives a wheezing laugh, though a look from Jace helps him keep his commentary internal.

“That’s SOP, chief,” Jace says. “You might just wanna . . . let Soldier do his thing.”

Sam holds out for a breath longer on principle, but Barnes isn’t the first stubborn asshole he’s found in the field and won’t be the last. He steps aside. “Yeah, well. You can let Steve chew _you_ out when you show up and ooze all over his spangle.” Then, to Jace: “And you know he’s not really a goddamn robot, right? Rumlow’s full of shit.”

Jace shrugs. “Don’t care either way,” he says. “A good soldier’s a good soldier, whatever he fuckin’ is and wherever he fuckin’ came from. This”—he gestures to the room with his head—”wouldn’t treat a dog like this, or a gun or a car, and especially not one’a my goddamn team.” He gestures to his boys, who haul Rumlow to his feet and push him, not gently, out the door behind Barnes. The he nods at Sam: “You too. Haven’t forgotten where you’re _supposed_ to be.”

Sam shrugs. Jace’s gun is trained on the floor and Sam supposes that’s as good as he’s going to get. He is still technically an enemy combatant infiltrating a secret base.

They head back to the control room, following in Barnes’s determined, bloodied wake. Rumlow is not a cooperative prisoner and, while he doesn’t actively resist, he spends enough time dragging his feet that he earns a little bit of a roughing up from Jace’s men. He calls them traitors a few times in return, which they don’t really know how to respond to. Jace’s men seem more loyal to Jace than to HYDRA per se, while Jace has his star-struck mancrush on the Winter Soldier, who in turn acts loyal to Steve, coldly protective of Sam, and actively murderous towards Rumlow. Sam’s sure there’ve been more dysfunctional workplaces in history, but probably not by much.

By they time they get back to the control room, Steve seems to be halfway through a full-tilt Captain America Is Disappointed In You Son speech. Rumlow’s men are bound and sitting on the floor, surrendered and abashed, and even most of Jace’s guys look about two minutes from blubbering for their mothers. They’re saved from the humiliation by Barnes’s entrance; as soon as Steve sees him he double-takes, squarks “Buck!” in and extremely un-Cap-esque voice, and comes running over.

Barnes practically falls into his outstretched arms. Maybe not quite so obvious, but he does seem to . . . slump, once Steve is in catching range, and allows himself to be maneuvered into a chair with minimal protest.

“Soldier!” Steve is saying. “What— What happened?” This last directed at Sam, and with such authentic anguish that, whatever else is going on, Sam really does believe Steve’s care for Barnes is genuine.

It’s Jace who answers, though. Snapping to attention with a, “Sir! Crossbones attempted to tamper with the Soldier, sir. Wilson alerted my unit and we coordinated a response accordingly.”

Steve looks to Sam, who nods. It is, more-or-less, an accurate description of events.

“Sam . . .” Steve’s voice is imploring. Piteous, even. He’s crouched next to Barnes’s chair, staring up like a beseeching spouse.

“He wouldn’t let me patch him up,” Sam says, carefully. “Wanted to report in, first.”

“Soldier . . .” Steve turns to Barnes, brushing hair away from his face. Barnes doesn’t react, exactly . . . but he doesn’t _not_ react, either. He willingly brought himself close to Steve before seeming to shut down, to leave himself vulnerable. Like Steve is someone he trusts he can safely be vulnerable with. That’s . . . good. Enough for now, anyway; the rest is over Sam’s head and out of his pay grade. Something the actors in question can work through when this is done.

Sam approaches with the IFAK held out in front of him like a shield. “Gonna let me look at those wounds now, buddy?”

Barnes shudders, only just on the side of detectable. Shock, maybe, though he’s disturbingly good at hiding it.

“It’s just Sam,” Steve is saying, voice low and gentle. “You remember Sam. He’s my friend. He won’t hurt you. He won’t come close unless you say so. But he wants to help. Is that okay?”

Barnes’s throat works, not quite in sync with theshudders he can’t quite hide. Then he nods.

There’s an emergency blanket in the IFAK and Sam hands it to Steve, who shakes it out and wraps it around Barnes’s shoulders while Sam gets to work on the worst of the lacerations (they almost look like _whip_ marks and _holy shit Rumlow_). Steve watches for a moment, hand on Barnes’s shoulder. Steadying himself, Sam thinks, more than anything else, especially by the murmured “okay” Steve breathes before he finally turns around.

“Alright,” Steve snaps when he does. “Report. _Now_.”

Barnes jolts a little, mouth opening like he’s about to comply. It seems like a reflex more than anything, because Steve isn’t addressing them, and it’s Jace who answers:

“Sir! Not much more to tell, sir. Crossbones mentioned he believed you’d tampered with the Soldier; think he was trying to . . . un-tamper? Sir?”

“You got a monologue, huh?”

“Sir, yes sir.”

“Agent, I’ve known Brock for a while now and, quite honestly, he’s full of shit.”

“Sir, yes sir.”

Steve turns to the man in question with an expressively frustrated shrug. “Brock . . . where do I start? The only reason you’re not dead is because Control needs you for the goddamn safehand. This could’ve been your chance to make up for running at the first hint of trouble after Insight but—”

“Fuck you! Don’t try and pretend that wasn’t your fault you fucking traitor!”

Steve, it has to be said, does the Frustrated Parent act exceptionally well. “Brock, has it ever occurred to you that then, like now, you don’t actually have a single clue as to what’s really going on? Why would you; you’re a soldier. Your job is to take orders and execute them, not second-guess strategy or question your organization’s objectives. And it’s exactly clusterfucks like this”—he gestures to Rumlow and his men—”that the Winter Soldier program was trying to prevent in the first place.”

“You didn’t give it an order,” Rumlow counters. “You _implied_ you wanted it to get your shield, but you didn’t _say_ it. Soldier should be too mush-brained for that. And I saw what you did to the MSM. When was the last time it was wiped, huh?”

“From what I hear, you were there,” Steve says, voice light like the fresh-formed ice above a fathomless, frozen deep. “Your old methods were Nazi-era sadism and the results were erratic at best. I’ve been working with Soldier since Insight to try and undo the damage from seventy years of incompetence. Soldier is now stronger, faster, more effective, significantly less prone to malfunction, and able to operate in the field for longer continuous stretches.”

Thing is, Sam doesn’t think Steve’s lying, not exactly. Barnes used brute strength to tear out of restraints obviously designed specifically to hold him. His behavior is . . . stoic, but near as Sam can tell he doesn’t seem distressed or confused or irrational. He’s well-fed and—at least before the wounds and the two days of marching—clean and healthy. He obviously understands what’s going on, at least some version of who he is, and talks coherently and confidently when he feels like it. And Steve gave reassurances and sought Barnes’s permission before allowing Sam to administer medical care; all to a guy who, pretty obviously, doesn’t have a great track record with doctors. He’s not, in other words, the barely human murder machine they originally encountered.

On the other hand, Steve is still absolutely talking shit and Sam is shocked the irony of Steven Grant Let’s-Invade-Italy-Single-Handed Rogers giving a “soldiers don’t question orders” speech didn’t give them all some kind of ferrous poisoning.

And it’s about then that Sam thinks:

_He’s stalling. _

Just as Rumlow is growling:

“The fuck are you to take over that shit? Who made you the head of the program?”

And a new voice says:

“I did.”

And every single head in the room (bar one) turns. And there, standing just inside the doors, just arrived and strangely alive, is Alexander motherfucking Pierce.

* * *

* * *

They have mangos in the supermarket. Steve buys three and grins the whole way back up the mountain to the safehouse, trying to imagine Buck’s reaction. Has Bucky eaten a mango before? Probably not. They definitely couldn’t get them when they were kids, and Steve can’t imagine HYDRA were big on feeding Soldier tropical fruit. Thus far all attempts at food have resulted in empirical descriptions of temperature, taste, and texture, but Steve has faith they’ll find something Buck will actually enjoy. Or hate. Or . . . something. Or maybe Steve should try asking Soldier, instead? He definitely avoids mustard, which is more of a food preference than Buck has yet to show, so . . . maybe.

This, of course, leads to an idle fantasy of hand-feeding Buck and/or the Soldier and/or both of them (because: fantasy) slices of mango then licking the dribbled juice from his/their chest. It’s definitely the sort of thing better suited to the inside of Steve’s head—in real life it just seems like it would be sticky—but it’s certainly putting him in the mood for _something_ when he gets back. They’ve definitely been doing a lot of _something_ since the night of Steve’s proposal. Not the sort of _something_ he used to record warnings about during the war, exactly, but . . . God, it’s still so good. Better, even. Steve isn’t exactly innocent but he’s spent most of his life either two coughs from death, frozen, or in the middle of a war zone, so opportunities haven’t always been prolific. Now they are, he’s definitely interested in making up time for making time, as it were.

In the bed, maybe. Bucky’s weight settled between his thighs, naked but for those tiny tight shorts people nowadays wear, undulating as Steve kneads globes of plush, cotton-snug ass in his hands.

Definitely _something_. Which is probably why Steve is already through the door and about to call out when he hears the plastic crinkle of a tarp beneath his shoe and the click of a gun’s safety behind his head.

“Don’t do anything rash, Captain.” The voice is unfamiliar, male. Accent is maybe German by way of the Soviet Bloc.

Steve sighs. “Gonna let me put the shopping down?”

“Please. No sudden movements.”

Steve puts the shopping down, and makes no sudden movements. From where he’s standing he can just about see his own blurred reflection in the den’s flatscreen TV—a benefit of this century’s obsession with open plans—which is how he knows the person behind him with the gun isn’t the speaker. It’s Soldier.

“Turn around, please.”

Steve does. Speaker is in his early fifties, maybe. Thin and nondescript. Not anyone Steve’s seen before, either in person or in files. He’s standing next to Soldier, looking less smug at Steve’s non-reaction. Soldier is pointing a never-before-seen USP9 at Steve’s head, eyes focused somewhere slightly above and to the left of Steve’s shoulder. Steve reminds himself Buck always was a crack shot and by all accounts Soldier is even better. He keeps his movements smooth and slow and predictable as he says:

“How’d you find us?”

Speaker scoffs. “Please. This is the digital age; a beard will not save you. Your location was posted on Reddit weeks ago.”

“Oh.” Steve does not have to even feign embarrassment at that one. Honestly, it’s not the cell phones or the internet in general that throw him so much as it is people nowadays apparently thinking it’s fine to constantly spy on other people and treat it all like one big joke. Case exactly in point. “How’d you activate Soldier?”

“You seem to be under the impression this is a little Q and A session, Captain.”

Steve shrugs. “What does it matter? If you’re gonna shoot me?”

“No last minute pleas for your life?”

“For Buck, maybe. What’re you going to do with him?”

“Nothing. I am merely retrieving our stolen asset. This . . . nonsense will be wiped and it will be stored until it is required once more.”

“Where do you think you’ll be doing that, I wonder? We’ve been blowing up your facilities for months.”

Speaker grins. “Yes. You’ve been doing an excellent job cleaning up our little messes, destroying evidence . . . Tell me, Captain. Just where did you think your intelligence was coming _from_?”

_Fuck,_ Steve thinks. Out loud, he says: “A destroyed HYDRA base is a destroyed HYDRA base.”

“Little mice running around nibbling crumbs. Too blind to see the cheese dangling right above their heads.”

“Which is?” Then, when Speaker hesitates: “Only one of us is getting out of here alive. If you didn’t think it would be you, you would’ve just taken Soldier and run.”

For a moment, Steve thinks it’s going to work; Speaker’s eyes brighten with that specific blend of arrogance and megalomania Steve’s seen a dozen times on a dozen would-be Hitlers. Then he seems to reconsider—thinking the house is bugged, maybe—and says: “No. No, I think it should be more amusing for you to go to your grave not knowing how easily you were played. Or for what purpose.”

“If you’re sure. Last chance to reconsider . . .”

“I think not, Captain.”

“All right.” Then, to Soldier: “I think that’s all we’re going to get. Make it clean.”

And Soldier shifts his aim, and fires.

* * *

The man’s name is Irakli Mudziri, which they find out from the German driver’s license in his wallet. He’s also carrying an ominous red swipe card with a single black star; Steve suspects, and Soldier confirms, that it grants access to restricted Winter Soldier areas within certain HYDRA bases.

“Did you know him?” Steve asks, as they both look down at the cooling body.

Soldier stares hard at Mudziri, brow drawn down into a scowl. “Uncertain,” he eventually says. Steve takes it to mean he doesn’t specifically remember the man, but can’t say for sure he wasn’t part of the program.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter,” Steve says. It’s partly to reassure Soldier and partly because, well. It doesn’t. Mudziri is dead. “Jesus. Now we’ve gotta . . .” He gestures at the body. “I mean the tarp was a nice touch but it only works if he falls on it.” Since it was laid out for Steve, he did not. And now there’s blood and brains splattered all over the den.

It’s not that Steve’s squeamish about killing, exactly; he was a soldier in a notoriously horrific war, he’s both seen and done far worse. But he certainly doesn’t relish it and it does occur to him he kinda just had Soldier commit murder. He doesn’t regret it—it’s only what Mudziri had planned for Steve and far less than what he’d intended for Bucky—but he’s very aware that now they have the problem of, uh. Evidence.

“Garage,” growls Soldier. “Chest freezer.”

Steve looks at him in surprise; he’d totally forgotten about the freezer. “You think he’ll fit?”

“Yes.” Soldier doesn’t elaborate and speaks with an authority that makes Steve realize that, actually. He doesn’t _want_ an elaboration.

So they put Mudziri in the freezer. It means relocating a bunch of stuff and throwing even more out when the inside freezer turns out to be too small. A part of Steve still rebels against wasting food, even in this age of poorly distributed plenty, so, when the work is done, he ends up sitting in the kitchen with Soldier, eating formerly frozen apple pies straight from oven-hot tins.

Soldier scowls at his, chewing slowly as he methodically devours it, until Steve asks:

“Something wrong?”

Soldier blinks, spine stiffening and gaze unfocusing like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t, i.e. thinking. The reaction is still instinctive but he unwinds from it after that initial heartbeat of panic has passed, and Steve smiles.

“This is wrong,” he says.

“The pie?” Then, when that receives a nod: “The last one you had . . . Jeeze. Was probably your Ma’s. She made great pies, your Ma. Never had one as good since.”

Soldier takes another bite, chewing carefully. Steve knows—because he’s read the files and HYDRA were extremely meticulous when it came to documenting cruelties and humiliations—that Soldier has eaten far worse things than a bland, mushy, too-sweet frozen pie. So it’s kinda funny, the way his expression doesn’t quite curl into one of abject disgust, but certainly looks it could do.

“You don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it.”

Soldier stops, frowns again, then takes another bite. Enjoying the novelty of . . . voluntarily engaging in something he doesn’t enjoy but is under no compulsion to continue? Or . . . something?

“Suit yourself.” Steve take another bite of his own pie. “This really is awful. It must be some kind of federal offense, I think; feeding Captain America bad apple pie.”

Soldier says nothing, but Steve can tell Bucky is rolling his eyes on the inside.

“I’m going to have to call Fury,” Steve continues, scraping the last crumbs from the bottom of the tray. “If nothing else, this place is burnt. And . . . If HYDRA really have been feeding us intel to distract us from something else . . .” He breathes in, then out; big and deep and clear. He’s seen other people do it to ground themselves. For Steve, it reminds him what he owes. “I’m going to need to go back online. With Natasha and Sam. I . . . I won’t insist you come. If you’re not ready, we can find you somewhere safe or . . . or you can ghost again. Whatever you need. But . . . if you’re up for it, it’d be an honor to have you back.”

Soldier has gone still, staring at nothing. Not panicking—his arm is quiet and his breathing steady—just . . . considering. It occurs to Steve how apt Soldier’s full title really is. How much he’s like a frozen landscape; a still, cold layer over the teeming life below.

“No need to decide now.” Steve isn’t really talking to Soldier and they both know it. “Just . . . think about it.”

A moment’s hesitation, then Bucky has the Soldier nod the asset’s head.

* * *

It’s like dreaming, Buck had told him. For both of them. At least, with Steve it has been. Before, it’d been a nightmare; a thin thread of awareness trapped inside a rotting machine, helplessly watching it commit and endure atrocity in turn. The only thing worse than the nightmares had been when the illusion had broken, when the thing-that-was-still-Bucky had resurfaced into lucidity, and that waking life had been more brutal and bloody and painful than the dreams ever were. So it had learnt—lash after painful lash—to stay asleep, no matter the horror, or humiliation, or pain or terror or anything the nightmares held. They had still been the only tolerable option. HYDRA had been very practiced at making that clear.

* * *

When the house is as clean as it’s going to get, they shower. Because Bucky really had been on a jog, prior to Mudziri speaking his trigger, and is actually kind of rank. Steve secretly finds Buck’s exertion sweat smell appealing—it’s the smell of an active body and a day’s good labour, of a man who’s fit and healthy and young—but, more than that, he finds showing together _extremely_ appealing, and so they do.

There’s something Steve’s been wanting to try. He hasn’t dared until now because of the trigger phrase—because he’s the one who’s been using it—but if nothing else today was a perfect, if unplanned, field test of everything they’ve been working so hard to achieve. That Soldier’s been working so hard to achieve. And Steve always did believe in rewarding hard and earnest work.

He washes Soldier carefully; lathering soap over firm muscle and soft skin and far, far too much corded scar tissue. They’ve done this before and Soldier reacts as he always does; by going boneless and plant against the shower wall, eyes closed and cock swelling, hips making little thrusting motions into the air. He’s so beautiful. So beautiful, and so eager to please, to be pleased. Steve knows this is HYDRA’s “programming” and so he’s careful, always so careful; to praise and comfort and soothe, both in mind and in body. But beneath that, he thinks a part of it is just Bucky, too. Loyal and steadfast, who followed Steve through fights and fever, endured mania and moods and the odd punch. Who was always ready with a joke or a warm blanket or a quick right hook, as the situation required. A good friend and a good soldier. And Steve, who’s never truly been worthy of either, but will damn we’ll do his best to try.

“You did good today, Soldier,” he says, voice low and breathy against Soldier’s ear. “You’ve worked so hard and it paid off. This isn’t the field test I would’ve chosen, but . . . I’m so proud of you.”

Soldier’s breath hitches, just a little. Hips and fingers twitching like there’s more he wants but isn’t sure if he’s allowed to take.

Steve’s takes a step back, earning a breathy little choked-off sound of disappointment. That, and stunning ice-pale eyes, opening to look at a spot just to the right of Steve’s hip.

Steve’s own cock is half-hard and eager and he cups it, enjoying the way the soldier’s eyes dilate and cheeks redden. So many little involuntary tells; so much life beneath the frozen surface.

Steve leans against the shower wall, one arm reaching above his head as he strokes himself lazily with the other. “I have a reward for you,” he says. “If you want it. _Only_ if you want it.”

By Solder’s parted lips and hitching breath, he wants it very much.

“If you want,” Steve continues, “you can touch. However you want. Wherever you want.” He raises both hands, letting himself be exposed and on display. He hasn’t had a lot of practice at this—at looking sexy, being seductive—but he hoods his eyes and rolls his hips and he’s pretty sure it works, if Soldier’s reactions are anything to go by.

Very carefully, Soldier reaches out. His touch is feather-light where it brushes across Steve’s chest, raising gooseflesh in its wake. Steve doesn’t have to fake his own gasp of breath or the way his heart speeds up in anticipation as Soldier steps closer, hand pressing a little firmer as he traces the line of Steve’s sternum down to the neat hills of his abdominals.

For a while, that’s all Soldier does; just hovers close, gently exploring with one single set of fingers. It’s both strangely chaste and entirely maddening, leaving Steve’s whole body alight with a singular, aching demand for _more_.

A pause in Soldier’s explorations and Steve realizes he must’ve said this last out loud. “Please,” he adds, words hoarse and shattered. “It’s good. It feels so good. I want you to feel good too.”

Soldier’s brow creases, just one little fold of concentration. Then, very slowly, he raises his other hand to join the first. Steve can’t help the choked-off whimper, stomach muscles shivering with want. Soldier knows how Steve likes to be touched because Bucky has spent so much time learning, but he’s so _different_ in his approach. Buck has an almost animal defiance in the way he touches Steve; roughly taking pleasure and almost daring Steve to stop him. Soldier is . . . not shy, exactly, but . . . soft. Reverent. Especially as he drops to his knees on the tiles.

“Oh God,” Steve breathes. Soldier’s fingers are tracing his iliac furrow, eyes hooded and lips slightly parted and _so close_ Steve can feel warm breath ghosting over his cock. He doesn’t . . . what does he _do_? Where does he put his hands? He—

Soldier licks, and suddenly Steve isn’t thinking of much at all. He stammers something incoherent; wants to tell Soldier he doesn’t have to do this, this was supposed to be about making Soldier feel good. Except the words fade before they bloom, scattered by the look of utter _bliss_ on Soldier’s face as he works his warm, soft mouth around Steve’s aching dick.

Steve just . . . leans his head back and groans. Starts babbling incoherent nonsense about Soldier being _good, so good_ as his fingers scrabble for purchase against the tiles. It takes everything in him not to thrust, to hold still and let Soldier gently lick and suck; not to reach forward and grasp Soldier’s hair and take his throat by force. Steve’s whole body feels like an exposed wire, shuddering uncontrollably, cock throbbing, thick with pain-pleasure as Soldier laps his tongue along the slit, presses the tip against the hole. His metal hand is braced on Steve’s thigh, warm and vibrating; his flesh fingers cup Steve’s balls, feeling the weight of them, pulling gently as they try to rise.

Steve chokes back a cry, fist thudding against the shower wall, and Soldier _hums_ in response. He goes from teasing licks to a consuming suck in one motion, and Steve is overcome by the soft, wet heat of it. Of the feel of Soldier’s tongue, curled around the underside of his cock. Of the constricting press of the back Soldier’s throat as he not-quite swallows around the head. It’s too much. Steve manages a ragged, “I’m—!” Hand coming up to push at Soldier’s face, to warn him.

Soldier does pull back, warm mouth replaced by firm fingers, but not far; his eyes are closed and his mouth open in bliss, and when Steve comes it’s to paint thick spurts of eggshell white on swollen lips and pink-flushed cheeks.

“God!”

It’s the most debauched thing Steve’s ever seen. The most _reverent_ thing. He can’t tear his eyes away, even as they want to close with the shuddering pulses of his orgasm. Soldier milks him through it with his hand, past the edge of too-much and beyond, until Steve’s knees fold and he’s collapsing against the tile floor, collapsing against Soldier, mouth open and hungry and seeking skin.

He finds it, and it tastes like sweat and water and Steve’s own cum, and Soldier arches his neck to allow Steve access. He shies away when Steve tries to kiss his mouth, but is otherwise pliant and pleasure-seeking, arcing into touches with soft, breathy not-quite moans.

“Please,” Steve says. “I want to make you feel good. How do I make you feel good?”

Soldier says nothing in reply, but spreads his thighs wide and climbs into Steve’s lap. It’s awkward in the stall—the shower is generous but they’re both large men—and Steve bumps elbows and kicks the wall until he’s spread out awkwardly on the floor with Soldier straddling his hips.

“Oh, God.”

Soldier’s back is arched, hips rocking, Steve’s still-hard cock sliding between the cheeks of his ass. Then he’s reaching behind himself, and Steve suddenly realizes what he wants and—

“Wait! Wait.”

Soldier opens his eyes, expression creasing into what could almost, _almost_ be taken as an unamused frown. God, Steve loves him. So much.

“I— Uh. Bed. We should— In bed.” Steve can’t seem to stop running his hands up and down Soldier’s thighs, warm and solid and real.

Soldier blinks, just once. Then stands.

It’s so abrupt that, for a moment, Steve thinks he’s killed the mood; that Soldier’s going to just up and walk right out. But he doesn’t. Just waits passively as Steve hauls himself upright and goes through the motions of shutting off the shower and getting them at least nominally dry. They’re both still painfully hard the entire time and it’s . . . awkward? Maybe? Whatever sudden rush of sexy confidence Steve may have had is gone, replaced by a weird fluttering sort of nervousness. They’re going to . . . do that. Not just with hands and mouths but . . . That. And Steve, he just . . . he wants it to be good. For Soldier, for Bucky. Wants to do well, to give pleasure, to not hurt. He wants—

“Nervous?”

Soldier is holding his hand. Steve looks at it, blinking. “Yeah.” No point hiding it; his palms are clammy, if nothing else. “But . . . I want this. If you do.”

“Acknowledged.” Soldier isn’t actually smirking but Steve hears it anyway, and he chuckles, and lets himself be led back into the bedroom. It’s just Soldier, he reminds himself. Just Buck. Whatever happens, they’ll be fine.

He ends up on his back on the bed, Soldier once more straddling his hips. For a while, Steve simply enjoys the sight; Soldier is rolling his hips in lazy waves, rubbing their cocks as he does. His face has gone pleasure-slack again, like he’s somewhere deep down inside his own mind. Steve supposes there’s a lot of cold and jagged edges in there, but Soldier doesn’t seem snagged on them. Instead, his hands roam over his own torso—stroking his face, and pinching his nipples—and he simply looks like he’s . . . enjoying himself. Enjoying the simple pleasure of his body—of “the asset”, of Bucky’s body—because that’s what he’s been told to do. So Steve murmurs nonsense to him, encouragement and praise, hands running up and down Soldier’s thighs.

When Soldier comes, Steve watches every second, rapt. He’s never going to get the image out of his head, he knows; needs to break every pencil and burn every sketchbook he owns, lest this moment be the only one he ever draws ever again. The way Soldier’s toes curl and his head hangs back, hair falling in rich umber cascades, throat working and arm whirring and resetting like it doesn’t understand how to process the sensation of pure pleasure. It’s beautiful, and Steve is hit by the thought, so strong and heady in that moment:

_I love you. Whoever you are and whatever you call yourself, I love you._

When Soldier’s done he slumps forward, hunched over Steve’s chest, held up with his metal arm while he gathers his own cum with the other. Steve strokes his hair, tenderly, tells him he’s _God so good, so beautiful and so good_, over and over. When Soldier takes his cum-slick fingers and reaches behind himself Steve nearly chokes, though he should be expecting it. It’s only a little bit of awkward shifting to grab the half-empty bottle of lube from the side-table and offer it instead.

Soldier eyes it, sleepy and soft, then grunts in permission, so Steve slicks up his own fingers and trades them for Soldier’s. This, he knows how to do; he’s done it enough times now with Bucky and knows how to reach the place inside that drives him wild. Soldier is no different, cock giving a half-hearted spurt even as his hands stutter where they’re slicking Steve’s dick. This next part, though, Steve’s not so sure about. Does he need to . . . stretch something? He’s much bigger than his fingers and he doesn’t want to hurt Soldier pressing in. He’s trying to figure how to ask when Soldier solves it for him, pulling away Steve’s hand and moving up and forward in one graceful motion and—

“Oh. God. Oh, God oh God I—”

He’s tight. So tight. And for a moment Steve can’t image how he’ll ever fit; he feels huge and awkward and clumsy, even as the pleasure shivers through him, and he’s about to tell Soldier _stop_ when something seems to give way and Soldier sighs and all Steve can feel is _hottightwethome_ as Soldier’s weight settles down over his thighs.

The next part is . . . blurry. Steve comes, almost immediately, body arcing off the bed, but Soldier ignores it. Just goes back to his maddening undulations, ass clenching around Steve’s dick over and over until Steve is sobbing, insensate. It’s too much and not enough, all at once. His fingers fist against the mattress with the sound of tearing cotton, every muscle twitching and shivering. He is nothing but the pressure-pain of his still hard cock, pumping cum deep inside the hot wet heat above him as he comes again, serum pushing him past human endurance and into an endless white abyss.

Soldier rides him, merciless and slow, hand fisting his own spurting cock, painting more splashes of pearl across Steve’s chest and face. It’s obscene. More so when Soldier gathers it up in his fingers and runs them over Steve’s lips. Steve obeys the silent command, sucking and lapping and Soldier sighs softly in response.

“You want this.” Soldier’s voice is quiet, so much even Steve almost misses it. “You want this body.”

“I want _you_,” Steve corrects, amazed he can still find something like a voice.

“Then take it. Make it yours.”

It’s permission, acceptance, and Steve lets out a sound closer to a roar than words. He grabs Soldier and rolls them, driven by something old and dark and animal. Soldier allows it, pliant and soft, thighs falling open and hips raised as Steve hauls him up and begins to thrust. Fast and hard, nothing like the slow rocking of before. Soldier comes again from it, straight into his own face from the position, and the sight has Steve pulsing, too. He doesn’t stop. He thinks he could do this for hours, for days. Maybe this is all he’ll ever do again; just a thick throbbing dick and a soft wet hole, the sound of Soldier’s gentle breathy gasps driving him on. He’s chasing something, something huge. Something as big and bright and terrifying as the sun, inched closer with every climax, something no human has ever reached or dreamed of reaching.

It takes second or minutes of hours or days, but when he finds it his whole body feels alight. He’s back in the chamber, swelling and expanding, mad with it as it bursts through every enhanced cell. It’s forever and and an instant, a g-force burst into a weightless fall beyond, and he cries out, still-new body failing as he plummets, shuddering and raw and blown apart and gone whole and home.

It’s dark for a while, after that. Dark and warm. And . . . sticky.

It’s that that brings him back. He’s lost time, but has no idea how much. Soldier is still beneath him, splattered with sweat and cum and reeking like a whorehouse. Steve groans, levers himself up enough to see his cock finally soft and numb between his legs.

His whole _body_ feels numb. He just . . . what? What _was_ that?

Very dimly, he realizes Soldier’s shaking.

Steve panics, just for a moment. Reaches out. Except the shaking isn’t silent and the noise that follows every shudder is a _laugh_.

Steve blinks, has one moment of strange, uncertain hurt, then:

“S-seventy f— Fucking years. All that f-fucking effort. Pinnacle of H-HYDRA engineering. And Ca-Captain fucking Am-America breaks it with his f-fucking super fucking dick.”

“Buck. Jesus. What—?”

Bucky has his arm thrown over his face and he lifts it, just enough to roll one eye Steve’s way. He’s grinning the most shit-eating grin Steve’s ever seen. “You broke it,” he repeats.

“Soldier? Is he—?”

Bucky waves a hand, lazily dismissive. Unworried, so Steve lets it go. It’s not like he thinks Soldier is a separate person, exactly. More like a . . . state, of hyper-focus and compliance. But if Bucky is fine, so is Soldier.

Steve drops back onto the bed, then winces when he lands right in a wet spot. It’s hard to avoid; the whole _bed_ is a wet spot.

“I’m. So f-fucking thirsty,” Bucky says, mostly to the ceiling. “And need a. Shower.” He shifts, then winces. “My. Ass feels like. Had a f-fuckin’ fire hose . . .”

Steve winces again. “Sorry.”

But Bucky just laughs. “Only. You, S-Stevie.” His hand reaches over to worm into Steve’s.

Steve turns his head to find Bucky already looking at him. Not quite eye-contact, but a close approximation. Buck is smiling, so Steve does too. Where they wind together, their fingers are tacky with cum. It’s . . . sort of disgusting, actually, and Steve starts to laugh.

“Oh? That. How it is.” But Bucky’s laughing too.

They end up curled around each other, kissing soft and warm and slow. Steve’s cock even twitches, once, because God bless Doctor Erskine.

The thought makes him laugh again, like he can’t stop, and Bucky pulls back just enough to ask: “What?”

“We should clean up,” Steve says instead. “Then . . . Jesus. I don’t even know.” Call Fury? Something.

Bucky hums, thoughtful, and rolls his hips. “Oh,” he says. “You think you’re gettin’ away that easy, do you?”

“Um . . .”

“‘Cause, Stevie? I gotta tell you: I ain’t had my turn yet.”

“Oh,” says Steve, blinking. “Oh God.”

* * *

* * *

Thing is, the only person who seems surprised to see Pierce walk, whole and alive, through the door is Sam.

Even Rumlow just snaps to attention—as much as a man hog-tied on the floor can—and says, “Control! Sir!” at the entrance.

Pierce scans the room, dismissive and disdainful, and says: “Do you have it?”

“Nope.” Steve pops the P, apparently unconcerned. “Brock here’s got trust issues.”

Pierce turns to Rumlow, eyebrow raised, and the excuses come tumbling out.

“I—! He— He was supposed to be dead! That was the job! I—”

“A distraction, yes,” Pierce says. “We discussed this.”

“I thought—”

“Did you? Why, I wonder? You were told to sabotage Fury’s safehouse and retrieve the shield from the rubble. Then to return with it and the Sokovian files for debrief. I’m struggling to see what portion of those instructions you found difficult to execute.”

“It’s _Cap_!” Rumlow says. “He had the asset take Wilson alive, and—”

Pierce looks Sam’s way, only briefly. “Captain?”

Steve shrugs. “Sam’s a friend and a good medic. We can bring him on board.”

“Like hell!” Sam says, because it seems expected. He’s mostly finished with Barnes, who had gone dead still and rigid at Pierce’s appearance. His emergency blanket is pooled around his waist but Sam is close enough to see Barnes is making a strange fidgeting gesture underneath it; touching thumbs to index fingers, flesh to metal, then rotating them. The gesture is . . . familiar? Where has Sam seen it before?

“Hm. He doesn’t seem convinced,” Pierce is saying, smirking an asshole smirk.

“We haven’t really had time for a heart-to-heart,” Steve explains, unconcerned. “Been a bit distracted by Brock deciding to try and break toys that don’t belong to him.”

“So I see. Brock?”

“I— I thought—”

“That _word_ again.” Pierce tuts. “This was very simple, Brock. You asked, begged, for a second chance. We gave you one. And this is what you do with it?” He turns to Steve. “I hope the asset sustained no lasting damage?”

“You and me both.” Steve’s voice has that dangerous edge it gets sometimes; the one most people wouldn’t even suspect Steve capable of having. “Sam’s been on first response.”

Another tutting sound, and Pierce turns back to Rumlow. “You understand, I hope, that you are _eminently_ replaceable. The asset is not.”

“I—” Rumlow stops, appears to think better of himself, and straightens. “Sir,” he says. “Understood, sir. I— Apologies for the misunderstanding, sir. It won’t happen again.”

“Good. See that it doesn’t. And the rest?”

“The rest” turns out to be a USB key, hung around Rumlow’s neck beneath his shirt. Jace—who’s apparently chosen, wisely, to fade into invisible subservience in Pierce’s presence—goes through the motions of retrieving it and unlocking it via Rumlow’s retina-print.

When the key’s LED blinks green, he hands it to Pierce with a, “Sir!” and gets an dismissive nod in return.

Pierce produces a tablet from somewhere inside his jacket, and inserts the key. It flashes, then the device beeps.

“Got it?” asks Steve.

“Handshake verified by the Sokovian base,” says Pierce. “Forwarding the coords to Coulson’s team now.”

And of all the things in the last few hours, _that’s_ the one that throws Steve for a loop. “Coulson?” Said like he didn’t hear it right.

Pierce looks up and shrugs. The gesture is . . . wrong, somehow. Alien and too-familiar, all at once.

“Ask him yourself when you see him.”

“Does no one actually stay dead in this century?”

“Really? You’re asking that? _You_?”

Steve throws his hands up, but he’s grinning. Rumlow, meanwhile, looks like he’s watching HYDRA fall all over again.

And Sam sees Barnes’s fingers twitch, circling over and over, and he thinks:

_Itsy bitsy spider, came in to sow some doubt . . ._

Steve says:

“We done here?”

“We’re done,” Pierce confirms. Then he turns to Rumlow, struggling on the floor, and pulls off his face and says:

“Thank you, for your cooperation.”

* * *

“Did _everyone_ know but me?”

Later, but not by much. Natasha is back to looking like herself and has taken to wrangling both Agent Fowler’s men and the remains of Crossbones Unit. The former are doing a bang-up job of, if not exactly surrendering, then pretending they never changed sides no sir just a little mix-up, all sorted now sir. The latter are mostly spending time trying to set fire to Rumlow with their minds for getting them into this mess, if their expressions are anything to go by. Rumlow is diligently both trying to ignore them and Soldier, who’s produced an M16 from whatever mysterious void he seems to secrete weapons from, and is busy standing guard. He’s wearing his silver emergency blanket like a poncho, making him look like the world’s most adorable—and adorably surly—space cowboy.

Which just leaves Steve. And Sam. The latter of whom is, uh. Not happy. To put it mildly.

“I left you a note!” Steve tries. “Didn’t you get my note?”

“It was like two lines, Steve!” Sam’s gesturing, eyes wide. “Not exactly a detailed debrief! Plus, I saw it for ten seconds before your boy decided it was lunch!”

Steve winces. “Yeah. He, uh. He does that.” Not for a long time, but it was the fate of many a hastily scrawled note in class, passed under the desk and devoured when giggles drew pedagogical ire.

Sam’s expression softens, eyes flicking to where Soldier is standing, still and blank-faced. “Steve . . . about Barnes—”

“Later,” Steve says. “Not here.”

“Steve . . .”

“I know— Look. It’s complicated, and I know how it looks. But he is okay.” He looks at Sam, does the whole ultra-sincere puppy dog eyes thing he’s been told he could weaponize. “He’s my best friend, Sam. I wouldn’t . . . This was his idea.” Which is true, at least for the parts involving Soldier. Nat and Fury worked out the rest. Steve’s job was just to play along. And try not to throttle Rumlow and piss on his goddamn corpse.

The eyes must work, because Sam sighs. “All right,” he says. “Fine.”

“Thank you. And thank you for looking after him.”

Sam waves a hand. “Practically healed up while I watch watching,” he says, though they both know Steve doesn’t mean only that. “Rumlow made a mess but he was doing it to hurt, not damage.”

“Motherfucker.”

Sam mock gasps. “Captain America! Wash out your mouth, son!”

Steve laughs, and it feels good. He’s missed this, he realizes. Hiding away in the mountains with Buck has its charm but he’s missed his other friends, too. “Don’t start,” he says. “I’ve been holed up in a safehouse with Buck for a month; one little ‘motherfucker’ is practically child safe.”

Sam looks at him then, bright-eyed and assessing. “That right? So how’re _you_ doing, then?”

“I . . . I’m good,” Steve says, words coming slow and . . . God. He means it. He really means it, maybe for the first time since the ice. “I’m really, really good, Sam.” Then, because why the hell not: “Got myself engaged.”

Sam’s eyebrows get comically high. “To—?”

“Yup.”

“Well. Congratulations.” He almost manages to make it not a question, and Steve laughs.

S.H.I.E.L.D.—or something like it—arrive about ten minutes later, and start ushering everyone away. Honestly, Steve isn’t sure what he feels about the organization any more but it’s not like they have many other options. He doesn’t recognize any of the new team and their equipment and uniforms are so similar to those of HYDRA it makes Steve’s head hurt. He must end up scowling because when Natasha comes over she gets his attention with a:

“If the wind changes, it’ll get stuck like that.”

“So they tell me.”

“Well ‘they’ tell _me_ congratulations are in order.”

“They are.”

“Hm. Well . . . I suppose I hope it goes well for you.”

“Thanks, Nat,” Steve says, and means it. It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of his relationship but, well. It’s Natasha. And it’s honest. And that’s more than enough.

“I got word from Clint. Sokovia is hot. They’ve found things.”

“‘Things’?”

“Experiments.” A pause, then: “People.”

“Jesus.”

Across the room, two of the new agents are nervously trying to remove Rumlow from Soldier’s presence. He’s ignoring them which, honestly, is making them more anxious than if he was trying to stop them. Steve’s starting to think he does it on purpose.

Natasha follows his sight line. “Be sure,” she says.

“I am.”

She makes a little _hm_ sound, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. Steve knows she has her own history with Soldier and will need to work through it in her own time. He won’t push.

Freed of babysitting duty, Soldier hands his rifle to a terrified agent and comes over to Steve. Natasha watches him approach, coiled and wary, but Soldier keeps his gaze averted and Steve between them. Unthreatening and unthreatened. Steve grasps his bicep when he’s in range; the blanket foil feels strange and almost electrified where it lays atop Soldier’s metal arm.

“How’re you feeling?” Steve asks. It’s the first time they’re really been able to talk since Steve put Soldier in a quinjet and waved goodbye, three days ago.

“Operational,” is the reply.

“That bad, huh?” There’s a pale, clammy sheen to Soldier’s skin and a glassy, sunken look to his gaze. In pain and exhausted, and likely ravenous to boot. Steve will bet Soldier hasn’t eaten, and knows he can’t have slept.

Soldier says nothing, just stands, quiet and close and barely responsive. Steve thinks it might be the closest Soldier ever comes to resting; waiting inactive near a handler, mind curled up deep inside.

“We’ll be able to go home soon,” Steve assures him. “Or . . . wherever they’ve got lined up for us.”

“Another safehouse, about an hour from here,” Natasha supplies. “Fury says not to blow this one up.”

Steve doesn’t bother trying to hide his wince.

* * *

Truth is, Steve hates this bit. The clean-up, the aftermath. He’s Captain America, the Man With A Plan. He jumps from airplanes and punches gods and aliens and Nazis in the face. He doesn’t . . . this. Stand around. Wait. _Sign things_. An agent wants to take his statement. Worse, an agent wants to take Steve’s statement on behalf of Soldier, as if he’s not capable of giving his own damn debriefs.

Soldier, who is still Bucky and, thus, is now and forever will be an enormous jerk, just stares blankly at the quaking agent until Steve all-but snaps: “Son, he’s been awake for three damn days. Do you think this can wait until tomorrow?”

The agent squeaks our something that involves the words “sir” and “Cap” and “Fury” and, eventually, Steve just takes Soldier in one hand and his shield in the other and gets on the goddamn quinjet.

Sam and Nat are waiting when he gets there, already buckled in. The trip isn’t long and they don’t really talk and, honestly, Steve barely remembers it. After take off he gives in and curls up against Soldier’s shoulder. It isn’t like it used to be; he’s too tall for it to be truly comfortable, for one, and the deltoid under his cheek is metal, for another. But it’s also warm and smells like Buck and the soft humming is sort of relaxing. He dozes maybe, just a little, because when he reopens his eyes they’re touching down and both Nat and Sam are staring at him with unreadable expressions.

The place they land is a military base, active but only skeleton staffed. No one is wearing uniforms and Steve decides not to question it. They’re directed to a little house at the edge of the compound and it’s good enough; he’ll work out the logistics later. For now, between Natasha and Soldier, he isn’t worried. The latter may look half asleep but Steve knows he’d be armed and firing in a heartbeat if something was off, and Nat wouldn’t even have come here at all. So it’s fine.

The house is obviously designed to be shared by mid-level non-military personnel; four bedrooms upstairs, all with separate en suites, plus a downstairs kitchen-living space. They make rough plans to get cleaned up then eat—it’s evening, somehow—and no one comments when Steve and Soldier disappear into the same room. It still strikes Steve as strangely thrilling. Quinjets and smartphones and flying laser armor are one thing, but they had science fiction in the ‘40s and no technology in the modern world is _that_ strange. But two men being able to kiss in public? To get married? _That’s_ the sort of future he went to war for.

They strip quietly in the clean, sparse fake-stone bathroom. The floor is heated and Steve watches Soldier curl scarred toes against the tiles; a tiny, quiet indulgence that makes Steve’s heart ache.

Sam has done his job and Soldier’s chest is a mass of sterile adhesives. The shower is the type on a bendy hose, so Steve uses it to wash himself and Soldier’s legs and back, then does the rest carefully with a damp cloth. Soldier sits and stands passive through the process, mouth slightly parted and swaying almost imperceptibly. Exhausted, but still awake enough to enjoy the affection.

When they’re clean and dried, Steve lays them down on the wide, clean bed. “You did so well,” he says, voice soft and low and just for Soldier. “And thank you. For Sam. I’m so proud of you.” He kisses Soldier’s cheek and brow and gets a shivery sort of sigh in response. “Hopefully you’ll get to sleep for a while, now.” Hopefully they both will, and not just in the literal sense.

They’re too tired to do much else but lie there, soft and warm, until Steve murmurs the deactivation trigger into Soldier’s ear. He shivers again, then seems to melt; into the bed, into Steve. More moments of quiet, huddled warmth, and if it wasn’t for the rumbling in Bucky’s stomach Steve can hear even from where he is, he’d seriously consider the merits of them both just pulling up the blankets and staying put.

Eventually, Buck just gives a final shudder and growls:

“Fucking. Rumlow.”

Steve huffs laughter, bleak but relieved. “There’s a prison,” he says. “Ultra-high sec, very secret squirrel. Natasha says they’ll transfer him there.” _Disappear_ might be a better word. Steve doubts a trial will be appearing any time in Rumlow’s future.

“Great.”

“Yup.” Black sites and secret ops . . . seventy years of the same damn shit, over and over again.

Somewhere, distantly, Steve thinks he can smell onion frying. “We should get dinner.”

“Ugh.” Bucky just burrows deeper against Steve’s chest. “Your friends . . .” he starts, and doesn’t finish.

“How about,” Steve offers, “I go out, and do the awkward conversation starter.”

Bucky mutters something into the blanket that might be _just fuckin’ pretend . . . least it don’t have to make conversation_ and Steve laughs and kisses the top of his damp head.

“All right,” he says, not really to anyone, and extracts himself from the bed with minimal resistant grappling.

The bedroom is stocked with the sort of bland, army-issue athletic gear Steve is used to finding in these sorts of places. Still no logos or insignias indicating where they are or who they’re with, but he pulls on sweats and a tee anyway, well-aware of the sleepy-but-appreciative gaze that watches him do so.

Natasha and Sam are already downstairs when he gets there, dressed in their own scavenged nothing-clothes; Nat is wearing a grey hoodie at least five sizes too big and the sight of her curled up in it reminds Steve of just how _young_ she is. How young they all are, he supposes, at least in relative time.

Nat is sitting cross-legged on a stool at the kitchen’s island while Sam does something with a skillet that smells amazing, and Steve puts himself halfway between them when he asks, “Can I do something?”

“Chop.” Sam hands him a knife and what looks like a rolled up stack of prosciutto, and Steve diligently starts cutting it into friable strips. “Talk,” is Sam’s second command, so Steve does:

“I found a book,” he starts, not at the beginning but close enough. “It was . . . an operating manual, I suppose. For the Winter Soldier. It had command phrases— trigger words. To put him into certain states. One of them is . . . well, you’ve seen it.”

“Jesus,” says Sam, at the same time as Natasha’s: “Where’s the book now?”

“Blown up. Left it in the safehouse. It burned with everything else.” He’d gone back to check.

“That what Barnes was running from?” from Sam.

“Yeah. He isn’t sure how many copies of the book there are, or how many people know the phrases. HYDRA didn’t exactly hand them out, but he thinks the techs would overhear and gossip. They were afraid of him.” He’d killed more than a few over the years, and even though HYDRA didn’t exactly broadcast that . . . A part of Steve still likes to believe people knew what they were doing was wrong. People were afraid of Soldier but they were afraid of themselves, more; of what being involved in something like that really meant about who they were.

“So, you . . . what, exactly?” Sam isn’t even trying his not-judging voice. Sam is definitely judging, even as he takes Steve’s chopped prosciutto and adds it to his pan.

“The book . . . it described Soldier like a machine,” Steve says, voice slow and careful. “Like a robot, something that could be . . . programmed. And reprogrammed. It had processes for how. HYDRA had been . . . they’d assumed things would have to be changed, over the years. Handlers, mission codes. There were protocols.”

“You reprogrammed him?” And that’s definitely Natasha’s interrogator voice. Still terrifying, even with damp hair and her oversized shirt.

“I don’t . . . actually think you can program a human being like a robot,” Steve says. “But I think . . . With enough time, and isolation, and pain . . . I think you can convince one that you can. But if you can convince someone of that—so powerfully that it turns into a physical thing—then you can convince them of something else, too.”

“What, exactly?”

“Do you remember . . . We were in Armenia. You wanted to show me that— the film. About the pizza.”

“_Do The Ring Thing_.”

“Right. But the disc didn’t work.”

Sam’s eyebrows have hiked up again. “Wait,” he says. “You . . . you’re telling me you . . . what? Reprogrammed the Winter Soldier to have region-locking?”

“There was a transfer code,” Steve says. “For a new handler. I gave it to Soldier then we worked on adding a new code that could override anything not authorized by that handler.”

“You reprogrammed the Winter Soldier with DRM and _an admin password_?”

Steve shrugs. “You did it to my laptop,” he points out.

“That’s because you kept—” Sam snaps his jaw shut, then looks at Natasha. “Can you believe this?”

Natasha can, Steve thinks, because Natasha can believe a lot of things. She’s looking at Steve, head cocked and eyes narrowed. “So who’s the handler?” she asks.

And from the top of the stairwell, shoulders hunched and hair pulled back into a messy bun, Bucky says:

“Me.”

* * *

_“I haven’t been entirely honest with you_,_”_ Steve had said. _“I’m not your handler. Your actual handler . . . you can’t meet him, not exactly. But I think you know him.”_

_“You’re. Fucking crazy,”_ Bucky had told him later, and Steve had just grinned, unrepentant. He’d told Soldier to work out a new trigger phrase. One only he and Bucky would ever know. That trigger could override any other, override any order, and no one would ever be able to remove it or take it away. Solder had gone rigid for a good twenty minutes, twitching, and Steve had been prepared for him to malfunction. But he hadn’t. And when he’d come back to himself again all he’d said was, _“Objective complete.”_

It hadn’t been quite that easy, of course. They’d spent weeks practicing; Steve giving orders that pushed Soldier just a little _too_ hard, physically or emotionally, to try and make Bucky push back. Thousands of burpees and a startlingly good Melbourne Shuffle later, and they’d started to get the hang of it.

_“It doesn’t have to be perfect,”_ Steve had assured him. _“It just has to work. And it does. You can do this.”_

And Bucky had just re-stated his belief about Steve’s sanity, but he’d gone along with it anyway. Because what other option had he been left with? And maybe he still didn’t trust himself, but he did trust Steve. And when Mudziri has come looking to collect, it had been enough; Steve had known it from the moment Soldier had trained a gun a hairsbreadth to the right of his temple, eyes fixed anywhere but Steve’s own. Bucky had thought Mudziri might have been good for intel and so Soldier had played along. It had worked. _“Like when you’re dreaming. But. You know you’re dreaming,” _Buck had told him later. _“So you can. Change things.”_

And Buck has changed things, all right; had reprogrammed the Soldier and taken back the part of himself HYDRA had tried to steal. And if helping that had been the work of someone mad? Well. Then Steve figures he can live with the insanity.

* * *

Later, in bed but not asleep, Bucky snoring like a sawmill an inch away. He’d eaten a mountain of Sam’s pasta and mumbled a few noncommittal answers to questions. He’d practically been asleep before Steve had even dragged him up here.

Steve, for his part, knows he’ll be awake a while yet. He’s exhausted, but it’s the kind that has his mind racing a with the speed of a crashing airplane, the kind that will keep sleep at bay until that last roaring second before the impact. Steve has been using it to watch Buck because watching Buck is still novel; a miracle of loss and recovery, even when he’s open-mouthed and drooling onto the regulation-issue pillowcases.

Steve is so, so stupidly in love.

He’s also not getting to sleep any time soon, and so slips quietly from the bed and down the stairs, heavy bag slung over one shoulder. He finds what he’s looking for in a cupboard in the utility room, and takes the old rags and turpentine out with him to the little house’s back patio. The air is cool but not cold, crisp with the timeless smell of the sorts of European forests Steve, nowadays, finds more familiar than the bustling streets of the neighborhood he grew up in.

It’s how Sam finds him, slowly stripping the paint from his shield; both Rumlow’s additions and the original colors underneath.

Sam brings beers, and Steve takes one, and they spend a while just sitting in the quiet, listening to the drone of insects and the soft rumbling of the rest of the base. Eventually, Sam says:

“Growing up, it was just a thing you knew, you know? Even if you’d never seen a film or read a comic or a history book, you knew it like you knew Ronald MacDonald or the Death Star. Captain America and the Howling Commandos, out fighting for truth, justice, and the American Way.” Steve doesn’t correct him on the phrase and Sam takes a swig of his beer, staring at nothing in this decade. “And I guess you don’t question it, while you’re still gap-toothed and snot-sleeved and in your short pants with the Cap logos on the side.”

“You realize I _will_ call your mother and I _will_ obtain photos.”

Sam snorts, grinning brief but real, before: “So you don’t question it then and you keep on not questioning it. What is truth in the country of James Earl Ray and justice in the land of Tuskegee. You keep not questing it until you end up in a desert selling the American Way at gunpoint and realizing the only form of that anyone is buying comes in a crate with Stark Industries branded on the side.

“So you come and tell yourself you can’t use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house but maybe you’re just tired of all the blood and all the screaming. And then one day you go for a jog in the wrong park and suddenly the government is a death cult and the sky is falling and you’re an internationally wanted terrorist, maybe, and you end up in a fucking bunker in the middle of fucking nowhere listening to your childhood hero tell a fucking Nazi, ‘Son, I went to art school.’”

His imitation of Captain America’s voice is terrible, but that’s the point, and none of it is funny, not really, but that’s also the point and so they hold out for one second, then two. Then they’re laughing, long and hard and just shy of hysterical, because what other option do they have?

“C’mon,” Steve says, when he’s caught his breath enough to try. “His expression, though!”

“He was— he was so proud! Bringing back his little trophy.”

Steve holds up the shield, still showing most of Rumlow’s handiwork. “The— it doesn’t even _go_ like that! The tentacles— See? They’re supposed to be more—” He traces the correct curves with his finger.

“I can’t believe you’re critiquing a dude’s shitty murder art. On _your_ property.”

“Art is still art! He could’ve at least used a reference!”

“Done one of those little grids they made us do in grade school?”

“Or a stencil! A stencil would’ve worked just fine. Instead—” Steve gestures at the dripping red splotch that could, really, only be considered an octopus and/or skull combo if squinted at quickly in poor lighting.

“I still don’t get why it’s a goddamn kraken,” Sam says.

“It is?” Steve peers at the logo. “I thought it . . .” He scowls: “Actually, I guess I never thought about it much.” But now that Sam’s pointed it out . . .

In Steve’s experience, when the Nazis were using octopuses in their designs it was mostly unflattering and antisemitic. He supposes he’s always assumed the skull portion was Schmidt, but now that he’s actually paying attention that makes even less sense.

“Hopefully it won’t matter. Just go down in History’s Worst Graphic Design Fails.”

“It’s not a _bad_ logo,” Steve says, magnanimously. As he said, art is art. Even—maybe especially—when it represents something abhorrent.

“It definitely does scream ‘evil murder cult’, I suppose.”

“The purpose of graphic design _is_ to symbolically convey intended meaning.”

Sam just gives him the sort of dead-blank stare that would give Soldier a run for his money and says:

“Art. School.”

Steve laughs, and dips his rag, and watches paint slowly disappear beneath smooth, patient strokes. It feels . . . good. Clean.

And so he says:

“I don’t know what will happen. When we get back.”

“With Barnes?”

“With both of us.” Fury is _working something out_, but Steve’s got no idea how far his reach still goes, what with things how they are. Jail’s still not impossible. Or execution. Do they still execute people for treason? Steve has no idea. He _should_, damnit. He should’ve—

Out loud, he says:

“Buck’s gonna need some time.” Then, because it’s Sam: “_I’m_ gonna need some time.”

“No shame in that.”

“I think . . . This world. Since they woke me up it’s felt like I’ve just bounced from disaster to disaster. When there were quiet days I’d wake up and— and just _wish_ there’d be something, anything. Aliens, robots . . . alien robots. Something I could hit, could fight, because sometimes that’s all it felt like I was good for. Like I came outta the Vita-Ray with part of me gone, the part that could just . . . exist.”

Sam says nothing, but he’s nodding, and Steve knows he _gets_ it. If anyone gets it, it’s Sam.

“And I think I . . . I wasn’t ready. Before,” Steve is saying. “To relearn. But now I am.” He looks down at the tiny clean spot on the shield, imagines the whole thing back to unsullied silver. Imagines something else painted over the top. Almost the same, but . . . not. Something familiar, but new. “And I’ll always . . . If I’m needed. But . . .”

“Thinking of hanging up the shield, Cap?” Not said with censure, but . . .

“It was always something they made me,” Steve says, slow. Thoughtful. Not a new thought but . . . it’s different. Saying it out loud. “Not something I was. They chose me, but it could’ve been anyone. And I think . . . I think that’s good. I think it _should_ be able to be anyone. Isn’t that what America is supposed to be? No gods, no masters. Just the right attitude in the right place at the right time, doing what has to be done to help the people who can’t do it for themselves.”

Sam nods towards the shield. “That what it means to you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I— I think it does.”

“So you’re gonna pass it on? Roll up the tights and make someone else worry ‘bout how it make their ass look for a change.”

Steve laughs, light and genuine. “Oh, God. Don’t remind me.”

Sam grins, the unrepentant grin of someone who will never, ever let something go. But what he says is: “You got your eye on a lucky dame, soon-to-be-not-Cap? Know who you’re gonna tap to be America’s Next Top Dinner Plate?”

And Steve thinks_ that others may live_ and he thinks of a open door, with no questions asked, and he thinks of a torn-off wing and of Bucky’s bandaged wounds and of Fowler’s team, going meekly into custody not by force of arms but because a man had made them admit to the truth inside they’d all known all along.

And Steve thinks of all of that and of silver wings and a new star and he smiles a real, honest smile and he says:

“Yeah. I got someone in mind.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _You sing the same old verse, stick like glue for better or worse_  
_What goes around comes around, again again again_  
_This heart, pulled apart; hydra fighting, head to head_  
_Burns are red, bruises blue; out with the old, [cheated by the new](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e7vfZIC_U0)._
> 
> Aa-aa-and there it is! The song that came on random on iTunes one day that inspired this whole mess. Totally tonally inappropriate, but. Hey! Now you know!
> 
> But, uh... thanks for reading my terrible, ultra-late, iddy plotbunny. And... come [drop by if you wanna say hi](https://orphan.black/). 💜


End file.
